The resignation of Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO has prompted a zillion articles on its impact on everything from Apple’s ability to continue to innovate to the future of the mobile industry. I don’t have much to add to that score. News of his resignation brought to mind two things, though, that might be new […]

To integrate, or not to integrate: that is the question. Or at least the one that has hung over Steve Jobs’ career that, sadly, seems to have come to an end.
By the late 1980s, Jobs was considered a fool outdone by the wily Bill Gates. Jobs – obsessed with the beauty of the Mac, with […]

Sometimes it helps to be reminded of the stunningly obvious. You know, like if you want to lose weight, why not just eat less and exercise more? My favorite business example is don’t compete where there’s lots of competition. Blue Ocean Strategy became an enormous business best seller by making that “oh, duh” point.
So here […]

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 […]

Visa’s recent acquisition push has brought the payments network giant a range of interesting assets, from merchant processing solutions, mobile and social media properties to technology solutions. However, Visa’s most recent acquisition, Fundamo of South Africa, may have the most interesting potential to influence the direction of global mobile payments, given its focus on using […]

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 […]

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 – […]