There’s no good news these days if you’re in the loyalty business. It’s easy, though, to think that there is. For instance, just last week, Colloquy’s annual loyalty census reported that loyalty membership is exploding, with 3.3 billion loyalty memberships now in place in the...
Kerfuffle is one of my all-time favorite words. I used it a while back to describe the situation that happened when some CurrentC merchants decided to shut off NFC capabilities at their terminals, thus denying iPhone 6 consumers the opportunity to use Apple Pay. That...
Have you ever looked up “innovation” in the dictionary? I did and here’s what I found. Innovation | the act of innovating. I always thought that there was a rule that you couldn’t use the same word to define a word but maybe that’s old...
The payments world was literally sitting on pins and needles waiting for the Fed to disclose more specifics on its 18-month study about how to deliver “faster payments” here in the U.S. This anxiety was created after the Fed floated its preliminary report last year...
Boy, did I ever step in it last week. I was speaking to a group of payments professionals in Denver and followed someone who had just extolled the many great virtues of Denver — the abundance of sunshine and microbreweries per capita, as well as...
Here we are – 19 days into a new year and midway in the month known apparently as “divorce month.” According to companies that track this sort of stuff, January is the month when most husbands and wives decide to officially call it quits –...
Last week, I was given a copy of the UBS report on Apple Pay. It claims that the launch of Apple Pay has accelerated the efforts of the retailers to join forces with banks to create bank-branded wallets. It says that these bank-branded wallets would...
What does retail today have in common with retail in 1982? Everything – and nothing all at the same time. And if you want to know where it’s going, and what it means for you, here are some clues. Starting with Jane Fonda. Last week,...
I wrote about 260,000 words over the last year summarizing my take on the many developments taking place in payments and commerce. All of those words were intended to be thought-provoking and start a dialogue about the future of our industry. And they did! Here...