Payments Views

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

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 […]