Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems...
I’ve been thinking a lot about how payments and payment-related technologies fit into the emerging world of multi-channel commerce or omni-commerce as some people call it. When a lot of companies describe their omni-commerce strategy, they are usually talking about...
Ecuador’s Central Bank has embarked on an ambitious course to launch an affordable and widely available mobile payment scheme. In fact, it will be the national wallet. With some uncertainty, it appears that Ecuador’s initiative may be the second central bank...
It turns out you don’t have to be unbanked to like M-Pesa I had the opportunity earlier this month to visit the mecca of mobile payments, which --with all due respect to the recent accomplishments in Cupertino -- remains Nairobi, Kenya. The “Kenyan miracle” in...
These are some personal observations on Apple Pay, after an exciting week of reading announcements from Apple and reactions from bloggers. (If you want a Glenbrook business view on the announcement, read Wednesday's post by my partner George Peabody.) For several...
Our clients are starting to ask us who we think is going to win the mobile wallet war in 2014. Questions like: What’s happening with the Isis rollout? What’s the next likely step in the evolution of the Google Wallet? Is PayPal’s In-Store initiative getting any...
Merchants and terminals were a key focus at two major payments conferences this week: NACHA and CARTES. The issue of EMV in the U.S. and the high cost for merchants to replace their terminals was raised repeatedly. Estimates for the cost of replacement in the...
As a social scientist by training, I’m fascinated with how ideas gain (or fail to gain) traction. In payments, there seems to a set of essential elements that are required for a new option to reach the level of traction. In no particular order, these elements...
This morning, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple introduced a slew of new Mac hardware, new Mac Mountain Lion software and, perhaps most importantly for us in the world of mobile and mobile payments, iOS6 - the next generation of...
I was in Washington this week for client meetings and to attend an FTC conference on mobile payments. At the conference, in addition to many regulatory lawyers and consumer protection advocates, there were the usual mobile payments suspects: Visa, MasterCard,...
