As many of you know, I’m a very mild mannered person – very, very few people will have ever seen me get angry. But sometimes dodgy PR does just that – forget road rage, I get research rage! The latest was triggered from an article that starts: “Britain is a country full of niche shops [...]

Last week saw a number of important developments at Google Wallet. Let’s recap what we’ve learned: Osama Bedier, the Head of Google Wallet, left the company. Google Wallet scrapped its plans to introduce a physical card to support purchases at the physical POS. Then, at Google I/O Developer conference, the company made a series of [...]

Celent recently published a report, Branch Boom Gone Bust: Predicting a Steep Decline in US Branch Density. As expected, some misunderstood the report as another piece decrying the death of the branch channel. It isn’t. Instead, the report advocates embracing a “right-sizing” of the branch channel as a means to strategically invest in retail delivery [...]

I’m attending Finovate Spring in San Francisco (Finovate.com). We’ve seen a number of great demos, and others that haven’t gone so well.  If you think of a classic consultant’s 2×2, with one dimension being strength of the idea and the other the strength of the presenter, probably the most unfortunate quadrant is the one that [...]

Yesterday Barclaycard launched a new service in the UK called Bespoke Offers. The website will feature a range of deals from some of the UK’s largest retailers, including Tesco, British Airways, Virgin and Starbucks. Participating merchants will be able to target offers to consumers, who will be able to select the offers they like via the [...]

My last post mentioned that I was on a panel at International Payments Summit talking about real time payments. The topic is one that has cropped up many times recently in analyst inquiry calls in the last few months. With all the activity in the market, such as the decision in Australia to implement such [...]

I spoke recently during the mobile track at the annual NetFinance conference in Arizona.  My slot at the end of the first day meant that by the time my turn rolled around, I was faced with good news and bad news.  It was good that there was so much agreement among all the participants, and [...]

I recently had the opportunity to accompany my four year on a school field trip to the Apple Store. Frankly, I had no idea that Apple even offered school field trips. Not only do they offer field trips, they offer FREE field trips. It’s a pretty simple formula. Get the little ones into the store, [...]

I presented at the CARTES America conference in Las Vegas last week. It was a great event with many interesting conference sessions and good opportunities to network. One of the highlights for me was the opening keynote with panelists representing various merchant organisations, such as Merchant Advisory Group (MRA), National Restaurant Asociation (NRA) and The Association for Convenience and [...]

Last Tuesday, 23 April, a hacked Twitter message from the Associated Press about an attack on the White House that injured President Barack Obama, turned out to be bogus. But the tweet sparked a brief 145 point market selloff that dramatized the power of algorithmic trading – sophisticated computer software that analyzes language using algorithms [...]