I just came back from three weeks of being on the road. I ran a workshop on merchant-funded rewards at Merchant Payments Ecosystem event in Berlin, presented on mobile payments at Celent’s own (and very successful!) Insight and Innovation Day in Boston last week, and managed to squeeze a holiday on the snow in between. [...]

They say, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” In my report last year I contrasted Google Wallet and PayPal as representatives of two fundamentally distinct approaches seeking to win in the battle to bring mobile payments to the high street. Not anymore – having failed to ignite the market in the first 12 months [...]

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 [...]

This week Visa held its earnings call and one of the key announcements was a pricing restructuring. In what appears to be a direct response to Durbin regulations, Visa is lowering its variable per-transaction fees and introducing a “network participation fee” in the United States for all of its debit, credit and prepaid card services. [...]

Walter Wriston, former Chairman and CEO of Citi once said, “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.” Google gets it. Up to this point I have been skeptical of the NFC business case and have blogged about it. Thin Isis Making a Bad Business Case Worse: Durbin and Mobile NFC Google [...]

Yesterday Google announced a new mobile wallet in partnership with Citibank, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint. Is it significant? Yes, very. Why? For a number of reasons. First and foremost, mobile proximity payments are getting a boost from a large player whose primary interest is NOT payments. Paradoxically as it may sound, in my view [...]

Many industry commentators who attended MasterCard’s Worldwide Media and Analyst Symposium on September 23rd in Purchase, NY noted the confident tone of the company, the energetic and fired-up management team and how the firm views some of the major challenges for the industry (e.g. the Frank-Dodd act) as opportunities. However, I think one of the [...]

The European Commission has continuosly stressed the need for a pan-European card scheme as an alternative to Visa and MasterCard. The chief argument goes that the existing duopoly of the two giants limits competition and choices for the European banks. There was a time perhaps when the association status of both schemes used to colour [...]

It was my wife’s birthday this last weekend, so as a special treat, I arranged a romantic getaway, just for the two of us, without the kids. On the way to our weekend destination, we stopped for lunch at a rural ‘gastropub’, a very nice place with some excellent if slightly exotic dishes (haggis cottage [...]