Inside Baseball for Payment and Data Geeks
Short blog on the Apple card and Apple’s history in bringing ApplePay to market
21 Jan 2020
I love my Apple Card.. both the physical card – with its wonderful “feel” – as well as the virtual card and how it is integrated into the Apple Pay Wallet. These payment jewels are all part of a Services Business growing at 20% CAGR that could be worth $650B by next year (MotleyFool).
Continue reading “Apple Card”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).
Continue reading “Adios Visa Checkout”My quick read on Visa’s acquisition of Plaid
I’m back to blogging after a successful exit last month. The Plaid acquisition is a great way for me to jump back in. Why read this? A key to understanding payments, banking and data is to balance historical knowledge with a network of people that know what is really happening behind the scenes. As the former head of two direct banks, former Senior Director of Oracle’s advanced technology solution’s practice and Yodlee’s first customer I have an informed perspective on the market for this one.
Continue reading “Plaid – Quick Take”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.
My Forbes Article Last Week
What We Can Learn From Rocket Science About Closing The Sales-Marketing Loop
Payments plays a key role in trust, not only during the sale.. but also in providing transparency to merchants on marketing effectiveness. Sales is the ultimate report card on what happened. Using this data in real time can double marketing effectiveness.
While Commerce Signals has taken me away from my Space Analyst stuff (see link), I’m very proud to know that my old team is landing Elon’s rockets (see Wiki).
Note: I’m not subjective on this one as I’m both an investor and former BOD member of hyperWallet. Of course I’m biased on all of my others too.. but just don’t have much of a financial stake.
Paypal has been on a tear in 2018, and is the leading payment stock performer in last 12 months – up over 60%. Continue reading “Paypal is on a TEAR.. iZettle and hyperWALLET”
I don’t like being a long toothed payment historian…. So please pardon my reluctance here… and let me know of any errors. Continue reading “SRC and W3C”
I can’t believe I’ve been writing about this stuff for almost 10 yrs. If any of you have suffered through my 20 blogs (on tokens) I certainly don’t want to rehash anything.. just bring everyone up to speed on what I see as major issues on the horizon for V/MA, Issuers and Merchants.
Headline: Visa and Mastercard have made it easy for millions of businesses and billions of consumers to work together consistently. V/MA are a thing of beauty, creating incentives for multiple parties to invest in payments (and grow network). Continue reading “Tokens and the Trojan Horse”
WSJ Friday – Paypal Passes Amex in Market Cap
Paypal’s stock has been on an absolute tear this year up over 70% and pushing their market cap over $80B, with 55x P/E (compared to Visa’ 40x and Mastercard’s 36x)
eCommerce and payments are both hot sectors…. PayPal combines both. Most would tell you that the “real progress” for PayPal’s stock started July of last year with the V/MA peace treaties (blog).
Paypal’s biggest advantage is focus… they are 100% focused on payments. This gives them advantage in both innovation and execution, particularly when they are not dependent on getting the “permission” of anyone else. Venmo’s massive success is a great example of speed and finding a niche that no one else saw.
I tell Dan that I see 2 primary vectors for further growth: long tail (small retailers) and international (particularly small merchant acquiring). Wirecard sees the later as well given they just purchased Citi’s acquiring business in Asia.
Paypal’s competitive environment, the bundling of payments, and tech (new authentication/payment in OS ) creates a very challenging environment for growth. Their ability to focus and execute is what will differentiate them as a new tech standard is meaningless if no one uses it. Example is Apple Pay in store continues to be a flop.. where as apple pay in-app is a crushing success.
What most impresses me this week? Paypal’s partnerships (see Dan present on this topic – CNBC). Parnterships are a HUGE driver of volume (look at eBay’s impact). Consumers just want the easiest/default payment approach.
Congrats to Bill, Dan and team.. making this progress while REMAKING a technical infrastructure in a highly competitive environment is tough!
CORRECTION
In a post entitled “What to expect from Money in 2020” posted on October 5, 2017, I stated that Bank of America had “pulled out of their relationship with Cardlytics”. Cardlytics has informed me that this is false and that there is no change in the relationships with Bank of America or Citi. I
apologize and regret this error.
I look forward to getting another update on the CLO space from both banks this quarter. It sure is nice that someone reads page 3 of a blog on Money 2020 to notice this stuff. I’m always open to correcting errors or omissions.
Guest post today from my General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer Russell Schrader. For those of you who don’t know Russ, he spent 18 yrs with Visa as their first Chief Privacy Officer.Russ just got back from almost 3 weeks in Asia Continue reading “China Payments – Field Trip with Russ”