When Visa restructured in 2007-2008, Visa USA, Visa Canada, and Visa International were merged into the new public company. Visa Europe became a separate company owned by its member banks. An article in Wall Street Journal this week claimed that the European banks were ready to sell their stake in Visa Europe back to Visa Inc. I am not [...]

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. [...]

London Olympics are in full swing, and so far it’s been a tremendous success. I thought the opening ceremony was absolutely breathtaking – it was creative, ambitious, beautiful and yet so different from everything else we’ve seen. After Beijing, most people said it would be difficult to surpass the sheer scale and grandeur of that [...]

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 [...]

Last Friday, the press began reporting about a major data breach at Global Payments, a large US card processor. As always in the early stages of such events, there were plenty of rumours and speculation with various sources reporting stolen card numbers to be as low as 50,000 or as high as 10 million. This [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday Visa announced its plans to accelerate EMV adoption in the US. A confluence of factors, such as some of the US merchants and issuers making independent moves towards EMV, as well as accelerating developments around mobile payments, helped Visa decide that the time to act is now. It is the first time that a [...]

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. [...]

Visa announced the acquisition of Fundamo, a top solution provider for Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to support mobile payments. Visa clearly saw mobile money as a threat. Too many mPesa success stories combined with the ability to send money from mobile phone to mobile phone across carriers would create a powerful global payment scheme in [...]

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 [...]