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  • Archive for the 'Payments' Category

    Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire?

    By: Karen Webster on April 21st, 2010

    There’s a lot of speculation about the recent move by

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    The Effect of Card Acceptance on Sales: The Case of Taxicabs in New York

    By: David Evans on November 9th, 2009

    Does taking plastic get people to spend more money? The card networks certainly think so and have often touted increased sales as one of the reasons why merchants should accept plastic and be happy to pay for it. My skeptical economist colleagues question this. They argue that the main effect of accepting cards is to […]

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    The Invisible Engine Wars: Amazon and PayPal’s App Strategy; Will MasterCard and Visa Fight Too?

    By: David Evans on November 9th, 2009

    Amazon and PayPal have both announced aggressive efforts to persuade developers to use their payment technologies. Each has opened up a gateway into their payment platforms. They are providing developers with tools for writing applications that use their payment technologies. And they are “evangelizing” their payment platforms to encourage lots of developers […]

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    Mobile App Wars’ Impact on the Payments Biz

    By: David Evans on November 6th, 2009

    The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
    Just recently the Apple iPhone topped more than 100,000 apps. It was just two years ago, on October 17th, that Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to allow third-party developers to build […]

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    HBS Summit Says Social will Soon Ring the Register

    By: Karen Webster on October 12th, 2009

    I was part of an interesting panel discussion on Saturday on what social networking means for business and what the future holds. This panel was part of the Harvard Business School’s African American Alumni Associations Annual Leadership Summit and included Kevin Colleran from Facebook, Laela Sturdy from YouTube/Google, Juliette Powell, entrepreneur and author of 33 […]

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    Don’t Kill Credit

    By: David Evans on October 11th, 2009

    Unemployment will be over 10 percent soon, the economy remains fragile, and despite bursts of optimism the recovery looks like it is going to be long and slow. Weighing down on the economy is the fact that many consumers and small business owners are having trouble borrowing. Lots of people are finding that credit card […]

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    The Welch Interchange Fee Bill to Consumers

    By: David Evans on October 9th, 2009

    Last Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Financial Services on the “The Credit Card Interchange Fees Act of 2009” sponsored by Representative Welch. The Act would allow merchants to impose surcharges on cards, prevent card networks broadly defined from charging higher interchange fees for reward cards, require card networks to disclose publicly […]

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    Why Make Mobile Payments Easy when you can Make it Hard (and expensive)

    By: Karen Webster on June 22nd, 2009

    The NYTimes had an article yesterday about how investors are pouring (and have poured) tens of millions of dollars into payments on mobile phones since that is the next payments frontier. It talks about turning phones into “virtual credit cards” that enable “click and buy” commerce. Then it proceeds to describe the complexity […]

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    New Taxes for Paying with Plastic

    By: David Evans on June 11th, 2009

    The populist bandwagon to whack the credit card companies for a financial crisis they didn’t cause is still going on. The latest is proposed legislation —really a revival of stuff that’s been floating around—to help the merchants reduce the fees they pay to the card companies. You don’t need an advanced degree in economics—just […]

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    Credit Cards Don’t Make People Spend More

    By: David Evans on May 18th, 2009

    Do people spend more if they have a credit card? The answer will depend on who you ask.
    Credit card companies say YES! when they extol the benefits of taking cards to grumpy merchants. And credit card bashers say YES! too when they pile on reasons for why credit cards should be banned. […]

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