On the tenth day of Christmas millions of merchants got a proposal from Santa Fed Claus to cut the fees they pay debit card issuers by as much as 84%, putting up to  $13.6 billion in their pocket and a smile as big as boy getting his first Xbox on their faces.  Meanwhile thousands of […]

On the fifth day of Christmas, in the United States, Santa gave payments small businesses. Sure, small is beautiful as the blockbuster 1973 book by that name insisted. But even better when it comes to businesses—small is a lot!  There were almost 28 million of them in 2007. Now, about 22 million of them didn’t […]

PYMNTS.com is presenting its annual Twelve Days of Christmas Series. Yes, we’re early, but we figured that during the real twelve days most of you will be sipping eggnog, playing with your iPads, and spending time with your loved ones. So we’ve decided to make the clock tick twelve work days before Christmas.
For […]

Getting a new product off the ground is one of the great challenges in business. That’s well documented for entrepreneurs. VCs don’t get any return from more than 40 percent of their first-round investments and get back less than they put in for two-thirds. I haven’t come across any stats for major companies that launch […]

There’s a lot of uncertainty, worry, and fear about regulation in the payments business. That was one of my takeaways from the 2-day conference on payments innovation MPD held at Harvard on November 4 and 5. People had been so focused on the Durbin devastation sweeping through retail banking that they put the new […]

Not long is the short answer. A completely unscientific but reasonably educated guess is a couple of years. Here I explain why.
To some degree all new firms face an hourglass. Most firms fail and do so, mercifully, quickly. That happens because the firms aren’t nearly as good as they thought they […]

The movie promo for “The Social Network” screams “You Don’t Get to 500 Million Friends without Making a Few Enemies.” I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve heard that the film suggests that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. That’s hardly a novel charge against innovators. The tech press couldn’t get […]

Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and his partners made it look easy. The social networking platform ignited almost immediately after it was introduced at Harvard College. It didn’t take many friends seeking friends and guys seeking girls and vice versa to create enough “fissionable material” as I discussed in the last entry. Within a week, more […]

Remember the kid’s story “The Little Engine That Could.” That describes what goes on with a lot of startups in two-sided markets. The train is trying to get up the mountain, but it needs to accelerate to offset the force of gravity that’s pushing it down. If it picks up enough momentum it can make […]

Hard data are not available but based on my experience billions of dollars each year go poof in the payments industry from investments in products that crash and burn soon after launch. These products didn’t have a sound ignition strategy which should be the foundation of all payments innovation. This series describes what […]