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Payments Perspectives Blog
The MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index: A Method to Our Madness
Mobile payments have been at the top of the industry’s mind for some time now, but much of the conversation to date has emanated from the gut, rather than the brain. Operating on instinct and convention, many in the industry have been trying to understand and attack this problem based on what they feel to
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The Gutenberg Moment Comes to Africa
There’s been a lot of talk lately about mobile payments. And while the reality more than lives up to the hype, it’s important to understand why. The future of payments may well come “out of Africa.” Payment is essentially an “information logistics” problem. Except for specie (gold and silver), all money consists of promises to
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Social Media Becomes Another Customer Service Channel
First it was in-person, and then came snail mail, then phone centers, then IVRs, and then websites. Now there’s a new channel for customer service interaction—social media. The new “always on” consumer is eschewing traditional channels (that seemed cutting edge a short while ago) and turning to social media. Whether it’s Twitter or a company’s
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The End of Money: The Surgeon General Cometh
Last night I was multi-tasking between the important (catching up on Mad Men, having missed Sunday’s broadcast due to Easter) and the mundane (reading a copy of David Wolman’s The End of Money) and experienced an epiphany of sorts: paper currency is as ubiquitous today as smoking cigarettes was in the 1960’s—and may suffer the
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Small Business, Big Deal
Everybody, from the President to his opponents says that small business is the driving force behind the U.S. economy. I always believed this to be true, but just to be sure I went and checked the numbers. The politicians are right. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, in 2010 there were 27.3 million small
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