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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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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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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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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Over the last eight months or so, our team has been heads down working on a new and exciting project—the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index—to be launched next month. While we are not ready to share all of the findings yet, one of the headlines is mobile commerce (m-commerce) is the payment type consumers are
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As mobile begins to overtake traditional PCs, we anticipate a profound and widespread effect on the payments business. But what shape will it take? And where will it take hold? According a recent report from OnDevice Research, 38 percent of Chinese mobile web users only access the Internet via their mobile device. This is an
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Let’s face it, the payment processing business is one of scale. In order to function profitably, a processor must charge a very little amount on a lot of transactions – a loaf of many crumbs. For that negligible amount the consumer, issuer and acquirer all get peace of mind that the transaction will be safe
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