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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

On April 19 at the BayPay Forum on Mobile Payments in San Jose, the evening outside was calm, cool and quiet, with high clouds drifting across a full moon. But inside the Forum’s main hall, a quiet revolution was underway as clouds slowly drift across the face of NFC-enabled mobile commerce. Cloud-based payments and IP-enabled […]

The Basics – NSTIC and The Identity Ecosystem
On April 15, the White House announced the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) – a long-awaited framework for enhancing online security, while in theory, maintaining privacy, efficiency and consumer choice. The NSTIC paper outlines a public/private sector cooperative effort to develop and implement an Identity […]

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 […]

The recent Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters bring home once again how fragile and precious our lives can be and reminds us too of how easily disaster can strike anyone.  Spurred by a sense of interconnectedness and purpose, people across the globe are using social media tools to make a difference, donating money quickly […]