Glenbrook

Payment Rails and Other Tales

By Russ Jones on July 17 2018

In Glenbrook’s Payments Boot Camp, we are always talking about payments systems – how they work, how they evolved, who uses them, who provides them, who profits from them, and how they are changing. So I was a little surprised when one of the participants approached me recently at break and asked if we would […]

Payments Views

Amazon Go is the Uberization of Retail

By Russ Jones on March 1 2018

I had a chance to visit the Amazon Go Store recently and wanted to speculate a bit on how it all works, from a payments perspective, and think about the implications. The new concept store, if you haven’t heard, eliminates the all-sacred checkout. Who cares about Apple Pay adoption rates or EMV transaction speed when […]

Card Payments

Brands Blur as Digital Payments Flourish

By Russ Jones on October 19 2017

Remember the good old days? You carried a Visa card and you could use it anywhere Visa was accepted. Visa logo on the front of the card; Visa acceptance mark on the merchant’s window. To the cardholder, it was a Visa transaction; to the merchant it was a Visa transaction. No confusion. PayPal broke that […]

Amazon

Is Amazon Best-in-Class for Online Payments?

By Russ Jones on July 19 2017

Amazon.com is in the news all the time with its continued expansion of markets and fulfillment centers, its focus on innovation and long term R&D, and, recently, some very non-intuitive acquisitions. It’s easy to get swept up in their story. But when a company gets as big and powerful as Amazon has become, it’s helpful […]

Big Data

Artificial Intelligence in Payments

By Russ Jones on November 3 2016

We have started development on this year’s Innovation in Payments workshop, and I wanted to share our current thinking on a new topic we’re including for the first time –– the use of artificial intelligence technologies in the payments industry. AI technologies have been around for a while in the payments industry –– think about […]

ACH

Inside the Visa / PayPal Partnership

By Russ Jones on July 25 2016

After a great deal of speculation, Visa and PayPal (or is it PayPal and Visa?) have announced a partnership where the two companies will “collaborate to accelerate the adoption of digital payments.” The announcement, which was actually more detailed than most partnership announcements, speaks of putting the two companies “on a new path” for the […]

Amazon

Payments and the Internet of Things

By Russ Jones on February 16 2016

As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, people are starting to speculate about how it will be monetized and where payments will fit in this world of the future. Some think what’s needed is already what their company does best. How fortunate for them! Others think Bitcoin was invented just in time to payment-enable […]

Authentication

Inside the Digital Payments Workshop

By Russ Jones on November 17 2015

As new forms of digital payments begin to take hold, the old assumptions no longer work. What does it mean to issue a card when there is no card? How can transactions be risk-managed when payments credentials are masked and scrambled by design? And what is the impact on the loyalty and reward programs that […]

Card Payments

Inside the Payments Boot Camp – Global Payments

By Russ Jones on September 22 2015

Last year we expanded our Payments Boot Camp program to include a series of one-day workshops that give us an opportunity to dive a little deeper into a topic to share our experience and insights in a more interactive forum. And no topic has as much “real-world” demand as Global Payments. It’s a broad area […]

Amazon

Look Who’s Talking Now

By Russ Jones on May 11 2015

One of the fun things we do at Glenbrook is help clients think through product concepts in financial services, commerce, and payments. An intriguing area that I’ve been thinking about and watching closely over the years is voice-activated purchasing. My interest in “voice” stems from my belief that as microprocessors get smaller and faster, the […]