Apologize in advance for typos.. did not proof yet
Congrats to Early Warning and their participating banks in the Launch of the Authentify wallet! A service 6 yrs in the making and driven by my good friend and former EWS president Eric Woodward.
Last week Bloomberg reported on Project Breakout: Apple’s effort to bring financial services in house. So what is it? Here is my 60% confidence bet.
A continuation of my blog on Digital Dollar and CBDCs (Mar 2021). Conflict in the Ukraine and the economic sanctions on Russia, central banks and payment systems have created a “weaponization” of the USD. As a result, I see the China’s digital yuan taking off in next 18 months beginning with energy related payments with the middle east. While not impacting consumer payment networks, the shift will substantially impact USD hegemony and ability to impair funds flow of participating markets and geographies.
Today’s blog is part 2 to my 2016 post Transaction Costs and Value Orchestration in Commercial Networks. The “Big Picture” questions I’m trying to answer today are:
Will Visa Acceptance Cloud (VAC) be a watershed event that simplifies merchant acceptance and embedding payments into iOT? Changing the merchant side of the network has been a nightmare for all. VAC enables a radical expansion of merchant network capacity with one big asterisk. (Sorry for Typos)
There are only 3 major markets where credit card interchange is not regulated: US, Japan and Russia. In these markets, Issuers use interchange (US 130bps-270bps) to power consumer reward programs (see Tilting Networks Toward Merchants – 2015) and card marketing. The ROW has credit interchange regulated to ~30bps and debit 20-30bps, and the reward programs are much different (Barclays UK below). But regulating payment interchange HAS NOT resulted in volume loss for V/MA, to the GREAT frustration regulators.. this is a key point (more later).
