Well maybe a slightly exaggerated title, but I was personally delighted and professionally intrigued to see that VOCALINK are preparing to deliver their Faster Payments technology in Singapore and are part of a consortium proposing to deliver the technology in Australia. Personally delighted because, as a user of Banking services in the UK, Faster Payments…
Over the last 4 years we have seen the payments industry in “disruptive change”. Well established organisations have all been challenged by alternative players and all are moving through change cycle stages with varying degrees of speed and success. What appears to be most interesting now is that several of the established players are reaching…
The Payments marketplace continues to consolidate with acquisitions and strategic partnerships, and at the same time attract masses of new innovative players with the next “silver bullet” solutions/models. With low Interest Rates around the world making money cheap, so rising investments are plentiful. This month’s acquisitions include the acquisition of Distra by ACI and the…
Square payments – a device that plugs into an iPhone or iPad and turns it into a credit card terminal. Today this brainchild of Jack Dorsey’s is worth $3.25 billion having raised another $200 million in its fourth round of funding. To put that in to perspective Square is worth more than Hiscox ($3.1bn) the…
We’ve talked about mobile commerce and how new ways to pay would have an effect on cards, but maybe the biggest shift we will see in the near term is mobile phones taking on the role of the payment terminal. Following the success of Square in the US (processing $5bn p.a.) and iZettle in Europe…
It is very easy to say that the Alternative Payments Methods; Mobile, Square, iZettle, e-Commerce, Cloud Wallets etc., are approaching mass and will “replace” cards in the future. Appropriate historical analogies could be: “Cards are the end of Cash” – a statement recurring for about 40 years, or even the “Chip is the end of…
This year’s iconic Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, not only had the usual device releases but more significantly it had for the first time a wave of major mobile payments announcements. Probably the most active organisation was Visa, announcing key deals with Orange, Intel and Vodafone, each for very different purposes; Orange for person-2-person…
Whereas various NFC research studies predict an amazing commercial future of NFC services, which may result in around 860 million NFC handsets being shipped worldwide and €110BN in payment value globally by 2015, the key question to success really is how the commercial quotes are going to be achieved in terms of operational and commercial…
There has been a considerable acceleration of change within the mobile market space where both the NFC enabled players (Google Wallet) and non NFC Players (PayPal / Square / I Zettle) continue to create the new flight path whilst the schemes, banks and processors play catch up. Banks are only now beginning to publish their…
At least two fundamentals created the previous “.com” era; Ideas abounded on radical ways to capture new opportunities converting to mega revenue and instant large corporations Money was cheap and readily available – the investment community had deep pockets and could raise cash readily and at low cost Despite today’s economic turmoil these circumstances are…