Coachella Takes Payment Cards – Mostly

I spent the weekend in Indio, California at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival (often referred to as the “Modern Day Woodstock” for you Boomers). Over the few weeks leading up to the event, Square and Apple advertised quite a bit about how every single vendor on...

Fake Out – You Can’t Put Your Card in that EMV Slot

Visa’s CEO recently reported that more than 750,000 locations, representing 17% of the U.S. face-to-face card-accepting merchant base, are accepting EMV chip cards. While everyone in the industry agrees that it will be quite a while before the numbers reach “critical...

EMV’s Not-Very-Even Distribution

At our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camps, we often quote futurist and novelist William Gibson’s 1993 remark that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” in order to demonstrate that different payment methods take varying amounts of time...

My Half Life in Payments

Earlier this year, I was invited to keynote a conference in Sydney – something I always enjoy doing.  The conference sponsor wanted me to talk about disruptions, about how successful innovations in payments come into the world, and to provide a look inside...

EMV – Necessary, Insufficient, and our Lasting PR Risk

We are just a month away from the October EMV liability shift and the transition is, to no one’s surprise, mostly incomplete. EMV credit card issuance is expected to be at just 50% by the end of this year. Point of sale hardware upgrades at major retailers may...