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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Despite increasing online-offline convergence in retailing, there is still a chasm between online and offline payments which today’s digital wallets are struggling to cross. It remains a challenge today to use secure element-based payment credentials online and cloud-based credentials at the physical POS, although various solutions to bridge the divide are emerging. The above statements [...]

There are so many great conferences and events throughout the year that prioritising them and deciding which ones to attend becomes a critical task for any analyst as it would be impossible to attend them all. However, no matter how well we prioritise, come September, every year most of us find ourselves travelling a lot [...]

A few months ago I blogged about merchant rewards and cards and invited relevant companies to participate in my forthcoming research. I am pleased to announce today that the results of that research were published last week. The first report, “Can Card Issuers Turn Loyalty Program Costs Into Revenues?” builds the case for merchant-funded rewards. [...]

Just as PayPal in the US was gearing up to challenge the established order of payment networks (see my previous blog), on the other side of the Atlantic, MasterCard (MA) received news that the European General Court upheld a decision by the European Commission (EC) that the scheme’s multilateral interchange fees (MIF) violate EU antitrust [...]

The readers of this blog and Celent clients with access to our reports will know that when we talk about “mobile payments” we are careful to specify what we mean by it. While many talk about NFC payments, we prefer to discuss “mobile at the retail point-of-sale”, recognising the diversity of ways how a mobile [...]

Earlier this week, Payatrader announced launching a card processing service aimed at the UK small businesss across a broad range of trades, including builders, carpet cleaners, locksmiths, pest control, window cleaners, mobile mechanics and decorators. The home service providers and traders market has been underserved by the payments community in the past and is often [...]

I recently published a report titled “In Search of a Third European Card Scheme: Time to Move On,” in which I claimed that most of the initiatives aimed at establishing an alternative to Visa and MasterCard were unlikely to deliver a viable solution any time soon. I also said that the arguments for having such [...]