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...
Last week I was in Victoria, British Columbia doing one of our Glenbrook Payments Assessments. In anticipation of my trip to the North American Land of Chip andPIN, I had both a Visa and an Amex card reissued in the chip format. Neither of my issuers supported PINs...
When I was a baby consultant some twenty years ago, I remember standing in Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park (remember book stores?) thumbing through a paperback book called "The Rules of Marketing". Rule #7 that said all successful markets will subdivide into...
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...
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...
Internet Retailer recently published the 2009 Edition of its Top 500 Guide, which provides profiles and statistics on "America's 500 Largest Retail Web Sites". eCommerce professionals look forward to its publication every June not only to see the relative rankings...
Last week, Visa reported its second fiscal quarter financial results - and included a mention that Visa's US debit card purchase volume in the fourth calendar quarter of 2008 slightly exceeded that of its US credit card purchase volume ($206 billion vs. $203...
At Glenbrook, we’re pretty interested in what makes mass consumer adoption of new payments capabilities happen – or not. We’ve been talking lately about “brand as action” – the notion that consumers (and merchants) need a way to express how they are going to pay or...
It's springtime, and annual payments statistics are starting to bloom. A good time, perhaps, to consider the state of business-to-business (B2B) payments. NACHA recently released figures showing that ACH CTX transactions grew by 15% in the fourth quarter, compared...
By Bryan Derman It seems like it’s been a month now that we at Glenbrook – and people all around the payments business – have been holding our collective breath waiting to see what level of purchase volumes would be reported by MasterCard and Visa for Q4 2008....
