Opinion

How Lucrative Is LevelUp For Merchants?
July 22, 2012

LevelUp made news about a week ago when it announced that it was eliminating interchange fees for its merchant customers. Instead, LevelUp said it would assess a fee based on the value of the promotions redeemed by the customers of its merchants. This move was...

Talk Is Cheap: Redefining Innovation in Payments
June 19, 2012

We are about two weeks away from opening the voting on the 2012 PYMNTS.com Innovator Awards. The field that we have sent to the judges is nothing short of awesome. Some 150 companies took a lot of time to prepare and submit their nominations. What...

PayPal’s “Shot Across The Bow” At Square’s Local Efforts
May 28, 2012

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What Merchants Want Out Of Mobile Commerce
May 14, 2012

As I said on Friday, CTIA invited 50,000 of its closest friends to gather in NOLA for its big International Wireless show. My final post will describe a few further musings on what I saw and heard – and a summary of my most awesome...

Wallets Within Wallets At CTIA: Will Competitors Play Nice?
May 11, 2012

As I said on Friday, CTIA invited 50,000 of its closest friends to gather in NOLA for its big International Wireless show. I moderated a panel on mobile commerce, plus wandered the exhibit floor and sat in on some sessions. Here is my second post...

NFC? Not Again! More on the Card Industry’s “Betamax”
April 24, 2012

Okay, Nick Holland – I’ve taken the bait. Your NFC media advisory today refuting the notion that NFC isn’t to cards what Betamax was to video was simply too good to pass by. You actually selected the perfect analogy. Here is my argument as to...

Breaking the Groupon Habit, or, Making Merchants Money
April 04, 2012

I was doing some work today on the social commerce application that we’ve been incubating and piloting here at MPD. The application is a SaaS-based toolkit that allow local merchants to capitalize on the online/offline commerce shift that we’ve been talking about for a long...

Friday Five: What Will Keep David Marcus Up at Night?
March 29, 2012

Amazing news out of eBay today with the appointment of David Marcus as the new President of PayPal. As most anyone who has been living on Planet Earth for the last year knows, David is the Founder of Zong, the mobile payments app for gaming...

PayPal “Squared” Yields Triangle – And It’s Blue!
March 15, 2012

So much for first-mover advantage. PayPal Here was unveiled today as not the first, not the second, and by many counts not even the third or even fourth small business solution designed to turn phones into POS terminals. And, based on what I’ve seen and...