Theodore Iacobuzio
Vice President, Global Insights
Theodore Iacobuzio is vice president in charge of Global Insights, MasterCard’s interdisciplinary thought leadership organization. He and his team use research and analysis to better understand consumer behavior and market dynamics—and how those insights can strengthen the business performance of MasterCard customers around the world. Under his direction, MasterCard has published groundbreaking work on payments profitability, the myth of debit “cannibalization,” global debit point-of-sale migration, remittances in Asia/Pacific and the Middle East, and affluent segmentation in Brazil.
Prior to joining MasterCard in 2009, Mr. Iacobuzio led the Payments Practice at TowerGroup. Based in Purchase, N.Y., he can be reached at ted_iacobuzio@mastercard.com.
The story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that some very high-powered retailers are looking to ride the mobile payment wave is just the latest in a series. Every prospective player in mobile wants to stake out a claim. The story, however, raises more questions than it answers. Here’s the money quote: “The
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From this morning’s Wall Street Journal, “More Decide to Charge a Taxi Ride” (subscription required): “‘Why do restaurants and businesses accept credit cards when they get charged a fee on it? Because it brings in more business,’ said Michael Woloz, a spokesman and lobbyist for the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, an association of 35 different
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The news on Tuesday, February 7 that U.S. consumer borrowing on credit cards rose pretty sharply in December (after a very steep rise in November) elicited some head-scratching on the part of reporters and others who were asked to come up with an instant analysis of the data. On the one hand, spending on credit cards
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Any global, broad-based payments issue first yields a lot of noise in the data: Every market in the world is going to vary, subtly or not, from every other market. That means that when common denominators do emerge, they’re very powerful—in part simply because they are applicable globally. Here’s one: Consumer adoption of electronic payment
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Italian premier Mario Monti has decided to ban cash payments of more than €1,000 ($1,340) in an effort to get more taxes out of the Italian consumer. Fair enough, but as the Bloomberg BusinessWeek story points out, most Italian landlords prefer to receive their rent in cash rather than—checks. What’s wrong with this picture? The
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You don’t have to answer in the form of a question. Who wrote to F.A. Hayek on the publication of The Road to Serfdom, “Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement”? J.M. Keynes, of course—supposedly Professor
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David Brooks’s October 18th New York Times column (subscription may be required) underlines something Global Insights has been saying for some time now: the shift to thrift is real, quantifiable, and irrevocable. Consumer behavior evinces today stark contrasts to pre-crisis norms all over the place. At first your agent was going to go all snarky
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