Carol Benson, one of my fellow founders of Glenbrook Partners, is retiring at the end of June, following our other founder, Scott Loftesness, who retired four years ago. It seems like only a few years ago (certainly less than 20) that the entire company fit in one car with room for my dog sharing the […]
How Fast Can You Go? Glenbrook Partners’ Allen Weinberg On How We Move Money
Digital River’s Commerce Connect podcast is focused on e-commerce and the people who make e-commerce payments happen. In this episode, Glenbrook partner Allen Weinberg is interviewed. Take a listen as Allen observes how the market has changed and how its rate of change and complexity has grown. He addresses, in particular, the evolution and impact […]
Merchants Just Want to Sell Stuff
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 […]
Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link
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 […]
Fake Out – You Can’t Put Your Card in that EMV Slot
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 […]
Enough with the 2016 Predictions – Let’s Think Bigger!
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 […]
Merchant App Stores Today
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 […]
More on Change at the Point of Sale
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 […]
The South Korean Card Market’s Fascinating Structure
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 […]
Is the Target Breach the Chernobyl of Payments?
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 […]