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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s less than two weeks until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The Olympic spirit is already in the air in London with all sort of preparations entering their final stages. A section of M4, a major motorway connecting the West of the UK with London was closed for a few days last week [...]

It’s official – I can’t go on holiday anymore. Or at least, not if I want to keep up with all the interesting developments in digital payments. Vacation and business travel conspired to keep me out of the office for nearly 3 weeks and in that time, there were important announcements from Apple, Microsoft and [...]

I recently blogged about all the different mobile payments initiatives in the UK. As if not wanting to be left behind, this week Canada had a few announcements of its own. On Monday, the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) introduced mobile payments guidelines. And on Tuesday, Rogers Communications, a Telco, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of [...]

Extensive travel tends to wreak havoc on the usual patterns and the best intentions. As a result, I haven’t yet had a chance to blog about an interesting development first announced a couple of weeks ago. FIS, a large technology and services provider, has announced a new m-payments system, developed in partnership with Paydiant, a [...]

Over recent months, there has been a considerable increase in the buzz around mobile and electronic wallets in the developed markets. New wallets have been launched (e.g., Google Wallet, Amex Serve), with many more companies announcing intent to compete in this space (e.g., Visa, PayPal, Isis, and others). A number of industry leaders proclaimed (again) [...]