eCom Innovation Success – Shop Pay

Short blog as follow up to yesterday’s blog on Acceptance Hurdles in eCommerce. Successful innovation requires a great new customer experience and/or economic model. The most recent success in the US is Shopify’s Shop Pay.

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Google Plex – On Track Pivot

I was quite surprised to see the front page of my Saturday WSJ emblazoned withGoogle Is Scrapping Its Plan to Offer Bank Accounts to Users.  As the former guy responsible for Citi’s online banks globally, and also a guy working in creation of the original Google Pay (as consultant), I thought I would provide some much needed clarity here (consistent w/ blog Google’s Bank Plans and the 20 others I’ve written on Google Pay over the last decade). 

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PayPal – ?Super App?

PayPal has been my #1 holding for last 5 yrs, and it has been on a fantastic ride… especially so over the last 18 months! (see MVP – Continued Domination for more). 

Paypal announced 2Q21 earnings 2 weeks ago (7.28). TPV growth was 40% with eBay, 48% without out, while sales grew at a 32% clip without eBay versus 19% with. Earnings? Not so much as margin erosion has hit the business. One core driver of margin has investors particularly concerned: “Take rate” (net merchant revenue less cost to clear payments) fell from 2.21% in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 2.11% in the first quarter and 2.01% in the second quarter. 

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Square in Crypto/DeFi

From Bloomberg yesterday 16 July

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/square-building-new-bitcoin-inspired-financial-services-business

Why is this a great thing for Square and DeFi?

#1 Today DeFi and Crypto in Commerce (POS and eCom) are in need of a “core” that can manage either compliance and connections to existing financial services, or operate in critical mass with minimal interaction to banks (ex – custody, exchange, platform, consortium-diem).

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Payments 2020 – MVP Continued Domination?

I’m back to blogging after a 5 year hiatus… The CEO thing is rather all consuming. Glad to have an exit so I can get back to my fellow payment geeks. 

What to blog about first? Given we are in new decade I thought about writing some grand predictions.  But rather than look forward, we must spend a little time in the past, as the past 10 years have been JUST AMAZING in payments. I’m calling this blog series “payment growth vectors” where I hope to recap what has transpired in payments (history) to provide a trajectory for evaluation of the future course.  

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The New Economy: Small Wins

I’m more passionate about this topic than anything I’ve ever written about. As an eternal optimist I don’t see a world dominated by Google, Amazon, Chase and Walmart…. But rather a new economy where millions of small businesses thrive. Where every person can employ their creative talent in collaboration focused on value creation. A world where capital flows to great ideas across geographic boundaries lifting the stifling poverty of most emerging markets.

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Browser Tokens – Payments in OS Part 4

My last articles on this topic were
I’ll forgive you if you didn’t see the big news out of Google I/O. There is a MUST READ article in Android Police that is spot on. Summary? Google (Chrome/Android) and Apple (Safari) are ready to integrate payment tokens in the browser.. Buy buttons will be integrated into ads, product listings, or a single “pay” button with no subsequent user information to fill out “quasi one-click”. From Android Police
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