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 to be a plastic card carrying the MasterCard bug and […]

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 promise of innovation. See if you agree.
The story of the […]

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 much credibility as the guy who bought billboards predicting the […]

I was not able to make Tim O’Shaughnessy’s presentation at MIT – I was en route to London at the time of his talk. Coincidentally enough, I arrived to read a really interesting piece in the FT on the Groupon IPO. I felt compelled to write a little something in response, prompted in part, by […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Google has signaled that it will do two things no one else in the payments ecosystem has done or even talked about: make a business case for merchants and consumers around NFC and maybe even put some real money behind it. Google has obviously made a decision that NFC is an opening into something more interesting […]

Google and Apple made news last week when they announced their respective plans to help publishers monetize their content. Less than 24 hours after Cupid worked his magic on Valentine’s Day, Apple began a subscription payment service that lets customers pay for content that magazine publishers make available via the Apple app store. There are […]