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...

It’s About the Blockchain

We’ve been working with bitcoin at Glenbrook for a few years now, teaching about it in our boot camps, and holding one-day workshops on math-based currencies and blockchain technology. I have one conclusion. The focus of the evolution of digital money is shifting....

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...

Disruption and Innovation at the Point of Sale

Surprising disruptions and unanticipated consequences abound in payments. Sometimes, it’s just a rule change that makes all the difference. In 2001, the NACHA rule enabling ad hoc web debits was put in place, primarily at the behest of banks who wanted to make it...

New POS Security from Old System Topology

Anyone around technology for a couple of decades recognizes how old ideas tend to return. To those folks, using a browser to do data entry into an enterprise database looks a lot like a mini or mainframe system’s terminal application. Back for another incarnation in...