A friend of mine was recently complaining about the latest overdraft charge on her debit card. Usually a responsible spender, she had overlooked her balance while paying off new expenses like student loans and rent on her New York City apartment. Without any solid experience balancing a bank account (and because many micro-purchases on campus
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A new report from Euromonitor’s Passport Alert service (login required) tends to confirm in a high-level way the key findings of Global Insights’ own Mobile Payments Readiness Index, while teasing out some of the implications in the numbers from both Euromonitor and MasterCard. The Euromonitor research highlights the sheer number of players who need “to
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Last year, Global Insights released a study of seven pertinent consumer trends driving U.S. markets. Since, the economy has marginally improved, indicating slightly higher consumer confidence, spending and saving. While most economic indicators are expected to remain stagnant for the remainder of 2012, one generation still stands in stark contrast to the rest – Millennials.
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How much is too much? Consumers in 2012 are being barraged by messages from marketers, some of whom have an arsenal of tools to reach consumers via social media. A recent article in Forbes reports that too many brands push out too many messages to consumers via social media; rather than helping consumers make decisions,
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A recent American Banker article interviews Barb Pacheco from the Kansas City Fed. The first sentence reads “Barb Pacheco has mobile payment fatigue”. It is her job to figure out what is going on in payments and explain that to bankers. I can’t say that I envy her. Sometimes I feel like Barb Pacheco. My desk
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At a cocktail party recently, I was talking to a handful of people about how much we rely on mobile phones to run our daily lives. Naturally, given what I do for a living, I threw out a comment about how I cannot wait until we can actually use our phones to pay for our
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Regardless of the consequences on U.S. politics due to the latest unemployment numbers, their effect on the rising generation of producers, consumers, spenders and savers cannot be overlooked. According to a recent TRU study, Millennials care more about unemployment than they do about crime, drug abuse, poverty and terrorism. While the evolving recovery yields slightly
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