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 new payments method. It’s also a real study in contrast of the struggles that others, namely ISIS, have had in trying to pull something similar […]

Despite the challenges faced by previous payments consortia (think Spectrum, Pariter and ISIS), many continue to believe that partnership and “co-opetition” are the best ways to compete in emerging payments markets, like online and mobile payments. On Wednesday, May 25, 2011, another formidable group – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – […]

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 ISIS’ business model about-face and created the chain of events […]

Finovate hosted their spring event this week at the San Francisco Design Center, bringing together the latest and greatest innovators for payments and financial service technologies in a massive exhibition hall in the city by the bay. The San Francisco Bay Area has been a global leader in business model and technology innovation, giving birth […]

SAN DIEGO — The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) opened its Annual Meeting and Expo Wednesday with a keynote address from Sen. Chris Dodd, former Chair of the Senate Banking Committee and co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Financial Protection Act. Dodd provided the audience of about 1,000 with an overview of the […]

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 joint venture and provided our initial take on the implications […]

Next to the content of bin Laden’s hard drive, what I’d most like to see today are the PowerPoint decks that led AT&T and Verizon to actually think they could start a mobile payments network. My guess is that between the two companies and their management consultants the following questions weren’t addressed or were glossed […]

Last week’s announcement of Visa’s strategic investment in Square set off a wave of news reports and blog posts about its implications for Visa, Square and the rest of the ecosystem. Most of the discussion was focused on the how much Visa invested (they say it was in the “single millions of dollars”) and speculation […]