One of the truly interesting presentations at this year’s Money2020 was the speech by Ben Lawsky, superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services. Lawsky’s remarks focused on his department’s BitLicense proposal and demonstrated the struggle Lawsky...
The Apple Pay announcement finally came yesterday and the company's orchestration of much of the complex and fractious card payments ecosystem demonstrates Apple's insight into how the current payments ecosystem works and how it must be aligned in order to meet its...
We're at it again. We're conducting our second annual Bitcoin and Payments Survey. Please participate! The survey takes about 7 minutes, maybe less. Do it from your smartphone while you're waiting in the market's check-out line or on the sofa using your tablet. The...
Bryan Derman and I led Glenbrook's second Bitcoin: Basics and Beyond workshop a couple of weeks go, this time in NYC from the 22nd floor board room of the Downtown Conference Center, a great space (the staff took great care of us, too, thank you). As with every...
Here we go again. The discussion and debate over Bitcoin's legitimacy and its labeling as the province of anarchists and criminals is about to get louder again. Why? Because Dark Wallet, an easy to use browser plug-in that makes bitcoin transactions far harder to...
Any reader of Payments Views knows that most of us at Glenbrook are impressed by the potential of math-based currencies (MBCs). And all of us agree that participants in the payments industry (in the broadest sense) need to understand Bitcoin and its crypto-currency...
Since the media latched onto Bitcoin as good fodder for the 24 hours news cycle, the hard focus has been on Bitcoin, its merits, and shortcomings, as a currency, commodity, and as next generation payment rails. My thinking on its currency and commodity aspects is...
For those companies and individuals most committed to building the EMV and NFC ecosystems, the place to be February 3rd through 7th was Salt Lake City where the Smart Card Alliance hosted both an EMV Migration Forum meeting and its annual Payments Summit. Over 525...
The news from Target, increasing the number of cards compromised to 70 million and the expansion of data loss to mailing and email addresses, phone numbers, and names, affirms that we’re in a security crisis. As my colleague Scott Loftesness puts it, card data is,...
Last year was, of course, the break out year for Bitcoin. Incubating in geek-nurtured obscurity during its first few years, 2013 saw the international media, global investors, entrepreneurs, and even a few just plain citizens jump onto the math-based currency...
