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 [...]

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. [...]

In my recent report on Digital Wallets, I discussed a number of players which while still keeping their cards close to their chests, have a potential to significantly influence the payments market. One of them is Apple, which made headlines recently with their patent for cash distribution without ATMs – see Bob Meara’s excellent blog and my related [...]

We are all familiar with the power of a good headline – it grabs our attention and compels us to read the rest of the story. In the world of printed newspapers, front-page headlines are there to sell papers. And it seems that ability to write a witty headline is a pre-requisite to getting a job at any [...]

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 [...]

Recent launch of the iPhone 5 made me decide that it was time to upgrade my old iPhone 3GS. I knew I was going to stay with my current telco provider (Orange, or as they are now known, EE), so I just went into an Orange shop to discuss my options. To cut a long story short, instead of buying [...]

I spent part of last week at Finovate Fall in New York (Celent is a proud Finovate partner). I always love the Finovate events – they provide me with a front row seat to examine the latest and greatest in banking technology. I’m primarily interested in companies showcasing emerging technology, and understanding how these technologies [...]

Just as Apple was announcing that its latest iPhone 5 would not include NFC (see my previous blog), NFC World reported that Casino, a large supermarket chain in France announced opening the “world’s first NFC-enabled supermarket.” The products would have NFC tags, which could be scanned by customers with their NFC-enabled phones in order to [...]

Yesterday Apply confirmed what many of us speculated on for months – iPhone 5 would not have NFC capability. It’s a beautiful phone – slim, elegant, with many attractive features, and no doubt will sell very well in the market. However, the payments industry was mostly interested in the question of NFC – “will they [...]

Another day, another interesting development in the mobile payments space. It was announced today that the European Commission “unconditionally approved” “Project Oscar”, a joint initiative between the leading UK telco operators to bring mobile payments to the UK. Earlier this year, the EC decided to investigate the venture’s plans citing competitive concerns. It’s clearly a [...]