Despite our industry’s preoccupation with mobile payments, here at Glenbrook we’ve been keeping a sharp eye on the state of the U.S. EMV® migration. Let’s call the U.S. approach, based on contact EMV only with no PINs on our credit cards, EMV Phase 1. That’s where we are today. While EMV technology has been settled […]
Inside the Visa / PayPal Partnership
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 […]
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 […]
EMV’s Not-Very-Even Distribution
At our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camps, we often quote futurist and novelist William Gibson’s 1993 remark that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” in order to demonstrate that different payment methods take varying amounts of time to become commonplace. Over the last year and more, most boot camp attendees […]
The Ten Most Annoying Things About Apple Watch
Message delay from phone to watch – I can hear my phone signaling a message has arrived but it takes a while to show up on my watch You have to remember to turn both watch and iPhone back on after being in airplane mode, even if set to “mirror phone” Only black watch faces? […]
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 […]
Mobile Payment Unintended Consequences (or How I Locked Myself Out of the House, Again)
I am writing this post sitting on the front steps of our house in San Francisco. I have locked myself out three times recently, more than I have in the past three decades. Is it dementia? No, I blame mobile payments. Last summer I bought a case for my iPhone that had handy little pockets […]
Adventures in Attribution – The Apple vs. MCX Dialog
Like many payments industry insiders, we have been following the recent impassioned industry dialog about the relative merits of Apple Pay and MCX’s CurrentC wallet with a combination of amusement and despair. The barbs and accusations being exchanged by the rival camps in this technological holy war between NFC and QR codes suddenly reminded me […]
ApplePay, NFC, QR (Oh My!) and the New POS
First There is a Mountain, Then There is No Mountain, Then There is… I’ve been thinking about what the future of the point of sale environment will look like from a consumer perspective. Of course, 10 years ago, we all knew what it was going to look like: consumers tapping their mobile phones to Near […]
Apple Pay Stirs, But Doesn’t Shake, the Mobile Landscape
The Apple Pay announcement finally came yesterday and the company’s orchestration of much of the complex and fractious card payments ecosystem demonstrates Apple’s insight into how the current payments ecosystem works and how it must be aligned in order to meet its own needs. Combining NFC, Apple’s Passbook wallet, Touch ID biometric reader, cards stored in the […]