Carol Benson, one of my fellow founders of Glenbrook Partners, is retiring at the end of June, following our other founder, Scott Loftesness, who retired four years ago. It seems like only a few years ago (certainly less than 20) that the entire company fit in one...
What are central banks – and governments – going to do about cryptocurrencies? I was in New York last week to better understand what central bankers are thinking about - and doing - with respect to “Digital Fiat Currency”. The workshop was part of an ITU Focus...
I had the good fortune last week to be part of the Glenbrook team attending the FinTechStage Inclusion Forum in Jakarta. Happily, among the attendees were two women I have known for several years: Maha Bahou of the Central Bank of Jordan and Carolina Trivelli of...
Last week in Geneva, the ITU wrapped up a two-year project - the "Focus Group on Digital Financial Services and Financial Inclusion". Several hundred organizations and people participated in the Focus Group, which produced research papers and policy recommendations...
Our co-founder, partner and friend, Scott Loftesness, is formally retiring from Glenbrook today. I can’t begin to say how much I will miss him – as a colleague, as a mentor, and as an endless source of ideas and insights. Glenbrook is today what it is largely...
The always-interesting Federal Reserve Bank Chicago Payments Symposium just closed, and predictably, a lot of the discussion (and argument!) was around “faster” – the evolving progress of the United States towards improvements in our payments systems. I was...
I'm back from two days at Consensus 2016 in NYC, and reporting as promised into my investigation of the Five Big Questions. 1. Bitcoin technology: will the problems (versions, processing time, scalability) be resolved? Yes. My belief that we are all writing this...
I'm headed to New York next week for the CoinDesk Consensus conference..."Making Blockchain Real". I'm going because I'm trying to get my head around some big questions. I normally have a sense, even with new things, of the path forward. Not in this case! Here are...
Today, Glenbrook celebrates its 15th birthday. It’s been quite a journey - an amazing one in so many ways - yet it also sometimes feels like we’re still on Day One! There’s so much happening in payments - and, more broadly, in commerce, financial inclusion, and...
Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg wrote a few weeks ago about his view of the Grand Challenges in payments…. a daunting list, and one I agree with. But I want to extend his discussion on one of his challenges: “Realigned value chain economics in a push payment world”,...
