17 January – Good news.. the right thing just happened.

This week we finally saw the “official death” of Visa Checkout and Mastercard’s “Masterpass”. Do you remember all those Superbowl commercials with Arizona wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald? Per my April 2018 blog, this “branded button” approach makes no sense at all at a time where Visa/MA are positioned to play a much more critical position as the central token directory. This means we will no longer see the “NASCAR like Checkout” I referenced 5 yrs ago when JPMC launched the much ridiculed ChasePay. Visa’s top 5 brand will no longer have an appended “checkout” on it (which no one used or understood).

21 March 2019

Happy First Day of Spring! I don’t know how many people still read this silly blog. I’m in a CEO time warp and just realized I haven’t written anything since NOVEMBER!! This will be a short blog with some random thoughts.

Big moves in Payments this quarter.

1. Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Global Payments and others are at ALL TIME HIGHS today.
2. Worldpay to be acquired by FIS for $43B
3. First Data to be acquired by Fiserv for $22B (all stock)

I don’t like being a long toothed payment historian…. So please pardon my reluctance here… and let me know of any errors.

UPDATE – Nov 29 2022 – Note that I have conflated the relationship between SRC and 3DS 2.0. 3DS 2.0 is the authentication protocol used by SRC. 3DS 2.0 has been widely adopted as a mandatory replacement to 3DS 1.0. Part of the driver for adoption was the EU SCA mandate. SRC has NOT been widely adopted as it is a fairly broken consumer experience at the moment.