One of the payments obsessions here at Glenbrook is understanding the ways in which mobile payment and digital financial services are taking hold around the world. Once effectively limited to the early success of M-PESA and P2P payment in Kenya, today there are a...
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...
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...
Last year we expanded our Payments Boot Camp program to include a series of one-day workshops that give us an opportunity to dive a little deeper into a topic to share our experience and insights in a more interactive forum. And no topic has as much “real-world”...
I read the Facebook announcement of payments through Messenger with interest, and just a touch of “about time”! After all, there is nothing more social than sending money to family and friends. And although much attention is paid in the press to the...
Walmart’s announcement that it would offer store-to-store money transfers has a number of interesting aspects worth pondering. At a high level, this seems like a no brainer. People need to send money to other people and lots of folks find themselves in Walmart’s...
I was fortunate enough to spend a day yesterday at Bill Maurer’s IMTFI (Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion) conference at UC Irvine. Bill is an anthropologist, and his institute funds fascinating small projects in developing countries that...
One of the more interesting aspects of joining Glenbrook is the essential need to stay up to date with new market developments and product enhancements. (Oh, the luxury to focus on what’s new and happening in payments!) One of the areas I’m interested in is bill...
This is conference week for me! Today I’m sitting at Mobile Money Americas in Mexico City, with a fascinating group of people working on mobile wallets in countries throughout the region. Of the 129 live mobile money projects worldwide (and let’s not get...
Consumers transfer tens of billions of dollars from the United States each year in international remittances. In 2009 the World Bank estimated that US$48 billion was sent from American consumers to friends and family in other countries, a number that represents...
