Throughout the 1980s and 1990s payment network consolidation in the US and Europe, resulted in a world with only 3 global credit card brands – Visa, MasterCard and American Express, supported by a host of regional/ local debit solutions.  However, the desire to avoid the dominance of US brands and expand their domestic card markets, […]

2011 will be the year that social commerce begins to take root on Facebook with solutions that are both merchant and customer friendly.
To be fair, pundits have been talking about “shopping on Facebook” since about 2006 when it first opened its platform to developers and concurrently introduced two new products (to an overwhelmingly negative […]

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 […]

This month, I was at the inaugural FinTech 2010 event in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched recently under the auspices of the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), TAG Fintech is a new society focused on financial technology companies in Georgia. Although few realize it, the Atlanta metropolitan area is home to the world’s largest concentration […]

I was asked to moderate a panel on Innovation in Payments Saturday (November 13, 2010) as part of Harvard Business School’s 16th annual Cyberposium. This year’s theme was Battle of the Platforms (a subject near and dear to our hearts here at MPD). http://www.cyberposium.com/ The conference usually draws about 600 people and this year was […]

MPD Payments Innovation Institute
Cambridge: November 4, 2010
Every new business needs a startup strategy: every new payments business and, more broadly, every new platform business needs its startup strategy to be an ignition strategy. I want to focus today on what sets ignition strategies apart from ordinary startup strategies and why they are so important for […]

It was really amazing to listen and learn from the array of innovators that assembled for the MPD [Payments] Innovation Institute last week. There were many important insights shared about how to find innovation, how get good ideas off the ground and making money, and how to get end users to switch away from […]

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 […]

Our long-held view that contactless cards were going to fizzle has really gone mainstream. Take a look at Randall Stross’ piece in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times.
His piece, “Maybe Your Old Card is Smart Enough” makes the point that those [contactless smart cards] emperors really have no clothes. The promise of faster check-out (one of […]