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Posts By Karen Webster
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4.2KPayments InnovationFraming 2021: Six Trendlines That Will Define Payments And The Connected Economy
Let’s start 2021 being provocative instead of safe with wishy-washy predictions. Karen Webster says let’s drop the prefixes from commerce. Then get...
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4.3KPayments InnovationIs It Time For Apple To Allow Others Access To The iPhone NFC Chip?
You can see it in the quarterly earnings reports this year of just about every publicly traded company and among the list...
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7.9KPayments InnovationGoogle’s Super App Wakeup Call
In June of 2019, PYMNTS asked a national sample of 1,037 smartphone users about their interest in having a single app that...
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11.6KCoronavirusCOVID Crisis: What Happens If Most People Don’t Get The Vaccine?
On the same day that COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 10 million and hit 50.5 million globally, the world got news...
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6.5KPayments InnovationRetail 2022: Digital Taps Pent-Up Consumer Demand
It’s one year from today: Nov. 9, 2021. It’s been 18 months since the coronavirus swept the world and changed everything about it....
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7.6KSubscriptionsWalmart+ And Amazon Prime Face Off As Consumers Decide Who Gets Their Business
“Membership has its privileges” was the nine-year ad campaign launched by American Express in 1987 to persuade consumers that it was worth...
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7.1KeCommerceHow Customers Fall Through The Cracks Of Digital Platforms
“Whose customer am I? And who’s going to take care me?” Those are the questions I asked myself last week when trying...
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6.4KRetailSaving Main Street From Its Downward Pandemic Spiral
Consumers crave certainty, and they work pretty hard to minimize the risk of making a bad choice. That’s why once consumers find...
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5.8KInnovationWhat The Great Time Revolution Means For Consumers
The “Mighty Thor” was a household game-changer in 1908. Invented by Alva John Fisher, Thor was the first electric washing machine to...
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7.4KPayments InnovationHow Consumers Forced Big Merchants To Up Their Digital-First Game
Human beings are creatures of habit. Take popcorn and going to the movies. Americans consume roughly 13 billion quarts of popcorn every...
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7.9KPayments InnovationWhat Innovators Can Learn From Netflix
Netflix Co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings has written a new book about building the video-streaming powerhouse that now has nearly 200 million...
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8.5KSubscription CommerceThe Rise Of The Auto-Refill Economy
The Commerce Department released July’s retail sales last week, showing an increase in seasonally adjusted retail spending – up 1.2 percent overall...
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10.8KPayments InnovationWhat Overcoming Inertia Tells Us About The Future of Physical Retail
By now, you’ve no doubt heard the story about how Isaac Newton turned quarantining during London’s outbreak of the Bubonic Plague between...
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8.6KANTITRUSTBig Tech And The Optical Illusion Of Monopoly
The most interesting thing about Big Tech’s Fab Four tour of Capitol Hill last Wednesday (July 29) wasn’t the perfunctory lawmaker grandstanding,...
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11.7KPayments InnovationWhat A 90-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About 2020’s Great Digital Shift
“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism.” That is the first sentence of a roughly 4,000-word essay...
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9.3KPayments InnovationHow To Drive Success In A Digital 3.0 World
In 1946, the then-61 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) saw the need for a consistent yet comprehensive definition of “health.”...
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9.2KPayments InnovationThe Vicious Circle Of Physical Retail Meets The Virtuous Circle of Digital
If your business touches retail in any way, it might pay to follow a few important breadcrumbs. Nike posted its lowest quarterly...
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10.4KCoronavirusNew Report: How A Global Pandemic Created A Digital-First Customer In 12 Weeks
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Then, cases in the U.S. had hit 1267 and...
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12.5KeCommerceWhy Digital’s 3.0 Shift May Take Longer Than We Think
There is an out-and-out frenzy to capitalize on the pandemic-fueled digital shift that gave consumers few options for accessing products and services...
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10.7KRegulationThe Flaw In Demonizing Big Tech
Between all the burger-flipping, and making sure your mask didn’t catch fire while you were doing it, you probably missed an important...
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11.2KPayments InnovationThe Big Jump: Pandemics And The Connected Economy’s Bigger, Faster Future
To understand when and how consumer demand will return and the impact it will have on federal and state efforts to reopen...
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13.7KCoronavirusWhy Consumers Aren’t In A Rush To Reopen The Economy
Economists, policymakers and epidemiologists have been modeling the cost/benefit of reopening the U.S. economy since governors began asking their citizens to #stayathome...
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13.9KCoronavirusWhy Reopening The US Economy Should Be About Reinventing It
Never has one letter of the alphabet been such a hot topic of conversation. That letter — V — has become the...
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22.9KCoronavirusWhen, How And Why Consumers Will Change Post-COVID-19
For weeks now, American consumers and businesses – everyone everywhere, really – have been desperate for the answers to three questions: Are...
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11.6KCoronavirusCan Main Street SMBs Cross The PPP Cash Chasm?
Friday, April 3 was the day everyone expected would bring a sigh of relief — and offer much-needed hope — to the...
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16.3KCoronavirusNew Data: Why COVID-19 Will Be The Connected Economy’s Inflection Point
March 11 marked the end of traditional business in the U.S., maybe even the rest of the world – and probably forever....
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12.7KCoronavirusNew Data: What COVID-19 Is Doing To Main Street SMBs
For most small businesses, the dawn of the new decade was filled with optimism for their futures. Consumer confidence was at an...
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22.5KCoronavirusThe 11 Days That Changed The Consumer’s COVID-19 Mindset
Thursday, March 19 was the first day of spring in the U.S. — a season that is symbolic of rebirth and renewal...
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35.4KCoronavirusWhat 2K Consumers Told PYMNTS About How COVID-19 Changed Their Daily Lives
On March 6, at the end of the first week that the coronavirus roiled markets and rocked the U.S., PYMNTS asked 2,128...
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14.9KBankingHow To Compete With Banks: Start With First Principles
Aristotle may have originated the notion of first principles thousands of years ago, but it would take Elon Musk to add a contemporary...
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17.6KCommerce ConnectedHow The Digital World Will Soften The Blow Of The Coronavirus
Sixty-seven years ago this month, Jonas Salk announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine for polio. Many in the U.S. breathed...
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11.9KCommerce ConnectedThe Connected Economy: It’s About Time
One of the most important innovations in history is the pendulum clock, which was invented in 1636 by Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch...
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13.5KEcosystemsWhat Amazon At 10 Can Teach Us About Uber At 10
Uber reported its earnings last week. Analysts seemed happier than they’ve been in a while about the company. That’s mostly because they...
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18.8KRetailWhy Consumers Are Firing Traditional Retailers
“Jobs to be done” – a theory popularized by the late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen – is the notion that...
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17.1KDeliveryWho Will Win The Restaurant Aggregator Race?
Foot traffic is flat as digital dominates top-line growth. Purchases are shifting from individual brands to marketplaces. Mobile influences the purchasing and...
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16.6KPayments InnovationWho Will Shape The Future Of The Connected Economy?
Ten years ago, the world of payments and commerce was in a very different place. ISOs sold terminals and card processing, mostly...
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39.7KPayments InnovationWelcome To The Connected Economy
Making predictions is simply irresistible at this time of the year – this year in particular. Tuesday marked not only the end...
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33.2KPayments InnovationWhy Google’s Deal With Citi Isn’t About Becoming A Bank (But Is Still A Big Deal)
It was the gasp heard ‘round the world last week. Google confirmed that it will partner with Citi and Stanford Federal Credit...
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18.1KRegulationCongress Wants Digital Platforms To Release Their Algorithms – Why?
U.S. lawmakers proposed new legislation last week that would require internet platforms to more or less lay bare the intellectual property that...
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28.6KPayments InnovationWhy Super Apps Could Have Superpowers
It’s what WeChat and Alipay already are in China, and what LINE is in Japan. Rappi follows suit in Latin America. It’s...
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33.3KMobile PaymentsREPORT: What Apple Pay At Five Says About The Future Of Mobile POS Payments
Apple Pay went live five years ago yesterday, on Oct. 20, 2014. When Tim Cook took the stage a month beforehand to...
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15.1KGig EconomyWhat’s Wrong With The Attack On Gig Economy Pay
Drivers can’t make ends meet. Given the median income of roughly $25,000 a year and the number of hours required behind the...
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18.9KCryptocurrencyWhat We’ve Learned From Libra
PayPal officially pulled its support of Facebook’s Libra initiative after it no-showed at the Libra Association meeting last week in Washington, D.C....
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14.4KVoice ActivationApple – Phone Home
“There’s no place like home” are the famous words spoken by Judy Garland, playing the character of Dorothy, at the end of...
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15.9KPayments InnovationThe Real-Time Payments Receivables Conundrum
P.T. Barnum perfected the art of showmanship, a reputation burnished by the spectacular fame of the traveling circus and side show that...
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18.8KCommerce ConnectedWhat The Trendsetters Say About How We Will Pay Next Decade
Sheep are not natural-born leaders. If they were, they wouldn’t need border collies or sheepherders to make sure that they didn’t follow...
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19.9KPayments InnovationWhy Invisible Will Make 2020's Payments Innovation Roar
The famous 18th-century political satirist and author, Jonathan Swift, wrote in 1745 that “vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” Two...
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21.1KPayments InnovationWhy FedNow Will Slow Real-Time Payments
I’m from the government and I’m here to make sure you get your paychecks faster – even instantly… …if you can just...
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19.8KEcosystemsWho Will Be The Consumer’s Everyday App?
Everyone wants to be the consumer’s everyday app – the “super app” to rule them all, the front door into the goods...
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15.7KRetailWhat 'Stranger Things' Teaches Us About Attacks On Big Tech
A couple of months ago, I decided to give spinning a try. I’m a runner, not a biker, but wanted to see...
