I spent the weekend in Indio, California at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival (often referred to as the “Modern Day Woodstock” for you Boomers). Over the few weeks leading up to the event, Square and Apple advertised quite a bit about how every single vendor on...
Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg wrote a few weeks ago about his view of the Grand Challenges in payments…. a daunting list, and one I agree with. But I want to extend his discussion on one of his challenges: “Realigned value chain economics in a push payment world”,...
As new forms of digital payments begin to take hold, the old assumptions no longer work. What does it mean to issue a card when there is no card? How can transactions be risk-managed when payments credentials are masked and scrambled by design? And what is the...
Smart. Very Smart. I applaud Square’s introduction of “$Cashtags” for a number of reasons. First, some of you may know that I am a bit of a nut when it comes to brand names in payments – I think it is incredibly important that the sending and receiving party both...
The recent entry of Amazon.com into the small merchant mobile POS card acceptance market may signal the last phase of increasing hostility in the US merchant acquiring segment of the card payments business. Prior to the launch of Square in 2010, the merchant...
Bilateral Adoption Claims Another Victim Word came earlier this week that Square had sunset its consumer-facing app, Square Wallet. The app had pioneered one of the great parlor tricks in payments, enabling a merchant using the Square Register POS app to recognize...
Just before the 4th of July holiday, Felix Salmon, finance blogger at Reuters, wrote an insightful piece, sharply critical of mobile payments and the long anticipated ability of our clever smartphones and wireless communications to improve upon a simple plastic...
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...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the opportunities around helping micro merchants accept electronic payments. You know, your basic nanny/gardner/hot dog vendor/flea market vendor scenario. There are two competing emerging-payments approaches to this market. One is...
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...
