Familiarity breeds trust, it seems, especially when it comes to mobile payments. By now, everyone and his mother-in-law has seen last week’s survey results touting Visa, MasterCard and AmEx as the top three trusted brands when it comes to mobile payments, with PayPal posting a...
So, I wonder how many payments industry hearts stopped beating yesterday morning when the news hit the wires that Google was issuing a credit card? Turns out that it was not THAT kind of credit card, but rather a small business financing tool that happens...
The interview that I did with Mike Grossman, CEO of Tempo Payments triggered several thoughts and reminded me of just how important the notion of critical mass is to success in two/multi-sided ecosystems. Here are my musings. 1. It’s really hard to get merchants and...
eBay’s announcement yesterday of its acquisition of Zong is just another interesting example of this e-commerce giant’s grand ambition to change the face of retail as merchants and consumers know it and experience it today. Here’s what I mean. Retail Nirvana as envisioned by eBay...
There was a lot of great stuff that came out of the Payments Innovation Institute at Harvard last week but two anecdotes that have absolutely nothing to do with payments specifically, I think, provide some of the more thought provoking insights around the pitfalls and...
I have always been up for a challenge. I read just last week a quote from someone from Forrester who basically said that anyone who believes Facebook is the commerce frontier is basically smoking something. (Well, what he said was that they had about as...
– Ask the Industry: Will Google Wallet ignite mobile payments? Share your thoughts here. Google’s announcement today of its NFC-mobile payments scheme is, with a few exceptions, a real textbook case study in what you need to do if you want to ignite a...
Hooray for the ISIS team for making the point that if Durbin is implemented as proposed, or close to it, innovation as we know it in payments will be decimated. John Stankey, AT&T’s head of business solutions, said that Durbin’s impact was the reason for...
OK, I have to say that the news yesterday about ISIS did not come as a great surprise to me. We were pretty gloomy (even for us) on its prospects at the jump. This piece pretty much summed up our point of view on the...
