On Monday a few weeks back, a member of a client’s executive team gave me a call: “We really need to speed up the project to find another bank sponsor.” That was followed by a call from another client later that day: “We’ve been thinking about what it would take to...
Anyone who’s been in a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp session with me has heard me emphatically stress that merchants “just want to sell stuff – they don’t want to be in the payments business”. Of course many larger and more sophisticated merchants have figured out...
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...
As I was slogging through the many payments-related articles and blog posts reminiscing about 2015 events and making predictions for what may or may not be ahead in 2016, I thought of a conversation I had with Scott Loftesness around 20 years ago, sometime in 1995...
Every three years or so, merchants and billers have an opportunity to reconsider their card processing agreements with their acquirers. This is an opportunity to negotiate lower rates — especially if business is booming – and also the time that a merchant or biller...
How does disruption happen in mature industries? Clayton Christensen famously wrote about this phenomenon in his classic book “The Innovator's Dilemma.” Most commonly, the new disruptor enters from below - by providing new capabilities to those unserved by the...
Some 17 months ago, I wrote a post here titled "It's Hip to Be Square" following the launch of Jack Dorsey's then new company. At the time I wrote:Square seems to be aiming at democratizing merchant card acceptance for physical face-to-face card transactions – a...
What Drives Innovation? More often than not, the successful innovations that surprise us come from disrupters who focus in a laser-like way on unserved market opportunities. In doing so, they are able to successfully fly below the radar of the incumbents (to use...
In a post titled "Great since day one", Marco Arment blogs about what makes the iPhone different - in essence he writes that Apple makes products that are great today. Android isn't.Reading his post brought to mind the fragmented nature of the card payments...
A number of us self-proclaimed “payments geeks” awoke this morning to learn of Visa Inc’s intention to purchase CyberSource for approximately $2 billion. Over the course of the day, Glenbrook’s been getting a flood of emails generally asking, “What’s the REAL...
