Commentary

Ready … Set … Wait!
December 16, 2012

  Discover: China’s Commerce Catalyst   Emerging Payments Goes To Washington   December 17, 2012 The Harris Poll released last week on the American consumer’s perception of the use of smartphones for digital wallets summed up the picture pretty much this way: great idea, but...

Discover: China’s Commerce Catalyst
December 10, 2012

  Emerging Payments Goes To Washington   If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t MCX It   December 12, 2012 One small step for Discover — one giant leap for emerging payments. Discover, China Union Pay and CardinalCommerce have joined forces to enable Union Pay cardholders to...

Emerging Payments Goes To Washington
December 02, 2012

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t MCX It Groundhog Day At Google Wallet December 3, 2012 I was invited to keynote a closed-door convening in Washington, D.C. last week that was assembled to discuss emerging payments and the role of government in facilitating the development of...

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t MCX It
November 26, 2012

    ANALYSIS FROM KAREN WEBSTER   Groundhog Day At Google Wallet   All Eyes On iZettle   November 27, 2012 I’ve been thinking a lot about MCX these days. I’ve read a bunch of articles and talked to a lot of people. I’ve seen...

Groundhog Day At Google Wallet
November 05, 2012

    ANALYSIS FROM KAREN WEBSTER   All Eyes On iZettle   Mobile And Payments: Two Peas In A Pod   November 6, 2012 Given what everyone was grappling with last week with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I’ll bet that no one even noticed...

All Eyes On iZettle
October 25, 2012

Mobile And Payments: Two Peas In A Pod Apple and NFC: Will They Or Won’t They? October 26, 2012 I had the occasion to visit with Jacob de Geer, the CEO of iZettle recently in its headquarters in Stockholm. The interview was amazingly candid and...

Mobile And Payments: Two Peas In A Pod
September 14, 2012

Ex-Apple exec Ron Johnson unveiled his vision for the transformation of JC Penney and retail last week in Dallas which included, among other things, checkout via mobile in an effort to both reduce costs and improve customer service. Initial enthusiasm turned to “meh” as analysts,...

Apple and NFC: Will They Or Won’t They?
September 03, 2012

I have a confession. I like to study vintage advertising. I know, it probably sounds weird in this day of digital and mobile techniques but I think that looking at old TV commercials and print advertising provides a really interesting barometer of our culture at...

Fifth Network…First Wallet
August 22, 2012

The payments industry barely had time to catch its breath from the Square/Starbucks news last week when the other payments shoe dropped yesterday morning: PayPal and Discover have joined forces to ignite the fifth payments network and something more important: the first, and certainly the...