Allen Weinberg

Merchants Just Want to Sell Stuff

By Allen Weinberg on August 29 2016

Anyone who’s been in a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp session with me has heard me emphatically stress that merchants “just want to sell stuff – they don’t want to be in the payments business”. Of course many larger and more sophisticated merchants have figured out how to use payments strategically to increase sales – think […]

Allen Weinberg

Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link

By Allen Weinberg on June 13 2016

Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems such as M-PESA in Kenya have grown in many developing […]

Allen Weinberg

Fake Out – You Can’t Put Your Card in that EMV Slot

By Allen Weinberg on February 9 2016

Visa’s CEO recently reported that more than 750,000 locations, representing 17% of the U.S. face-to-face card-accepting merchant base, are accepting EMV chip cards. While everyone in the industry agrees that it will be quite a while before the numbers reach “critical mass” (whatever that means to you), there are two key questions for today. The […]

Accounting

Enough with the 2016 Predictions – Let’s Think Bigger!

By Allen Weinberg on January 5 2016

As I was slogging through the many payments-related articles and blog posts reminiscing about 2015 events and making predictions for what may or may not be ahead in 2016, I thought of a conversation I had with Scott Loftesness around 20 years ago, sometime in 1995 or 1996. Both of us were at First Data […]

Allen Weinberg

Merchant App Stores Today

By Allen Weinberg on October 22 2015

In what seems quite a number of years ago, back in 2012, Merchant Warehouse (now Cayan), announced what I think was the first “Merchant App Store”, marketed as the Genius Customer Engagement Platform. Running on a somewhat traditional Verifone MX915 terminal, it was an early forerunner to the current iOS and Android-powered tablet-based offerings. I […]

Allen Weinberg

More on Change at the Point of Sale

By Allen Weinberg on April 28 2015

Glenbrookers are often asked to contribute their thoughts on payment trends. Co-founder Allen Weinberg is no exception. Here’s his take on the latest trends at the point of sale as he shared it with TSYS’ n>genuity journal.   What is happening at the point of sale, and why is it so important? There are a […]

Allen Weinberg

The South Korean Card Market’s Fascinating Structure

By Allen Weinberg on June 4 2014

My partner, Bryan Derman, and I just returned from a week in South Korea and a deep immersion in the local card market. As consultants serving clients across the globe—including payments -related companies in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia—we are repeatedly reminded of the remarkable differences between adjacent countries in any given region.  A […]

Allen Weinberg

Is the Target Breach the Chernobyl of Payments?

By Allen Weinberg on February 27 2014

Chernobyl is certainly at the top of the list of man-made disasters.  In light of recent events, I’ve been thinking that the Target breach has become the Chernobyl of the payments world. As a group, we Americans never thought that much about payment security – we really didn’t have to.  We are protected by federal […]

Allen Weinberg

Green Dot’s New Mobile-Optimized Bank Account

By Allen Weinberg on January 16 2013

I had the opportunity to attend the launch event of Green Dot’s new GoBank yesterday (1/15/13) in San Francisco and came away quite intrigued. Sure, there are a plethora of financial services targeting the unbanked and underbanked, but what I found most interesting was Green Dot’s focus on the “unhappily banked” and those new to […]

Uncategorized

EMV in the USA: A Mobile Commerce Jump Start. Who is Impacted and How?

By Allen Weinberg on August 22 2011

Visa’s recent announcement that essentially paved the way for wide-scale implementation of both EMV and contactless acceptance in the US was expected in some respects (based upon its earlier announcement in February), and surprising in others. Depending on where you sit in the electronic payments ecosystem, it could be a real positive, negative, or neutral. […]