A Look Back at Payments in 2011

by Scott LoftesnessSource: paymentsviews.com‍

As we’re winding down for the year, we wish you the best for you and your family this holiday season!

At Glenbrook, we thrive on thinking about how payments are evolving and how these changes will affect us in the years ahead. In this look back at the important payments themes of 2011, we share a summary of some of our best thinking over the course of 2011 from our PaymentsViews.com web site.

If there’s been a dominant theme for payments in 2011, it’s clearly been mobile payments. Over the course of the year, we commented several times on mobile payments:

• A Bubble in Mobile Payments? – Early in the year, Scott Loftesness shared his skepticism about mobile payments in the near term.
• ROAP – Chipotle Is Earning My Loyalty Today! – Scott Loftesness writes about his favorite mobile payments application – Chipotle’s remote order and payment iPhone app.
• Zigging and Zagging toward Mobile Payments in the US – Scott Loftesness looks at the debate between card credentials in mobile handsets vs in the “cloud”.
• Mobile Self-Checkout Breaks Out for POS Payments – Russ Jones gets excited about the possibilities of mobile self-checkout.
• PayPal Thinks Big Offline: Exploring PayPal’s Seamless Shopping Vision – Russ Jones takes a look at PayPal’s vision for moving into payments at physical world POS.
• Give a Listen: It’s Conversational Commerce – Russ Jones expands on Apple’s Siri – and how it might eventually be used for commerce.
• Square… It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again! – Russ Jones compares Squares market success with the early days of PayPal over a decade ago.

But there was more to 2011 than just mobile payments. Some of the other themes included:

• Micro Merchants: P2P Squared? – Carol Coye Benson takes a look at person to person payments – and who (or whether) micro merchants might play.
• Do You Want a Commerce Identity? I Do! – Russ Jones examines PayPal’s notion of a commerce identity scheme called PayPal Access.

Then there’s – of course – Durbin and the new regulation of debit card interchange fees for the largest banks in the US.

• Oh, You Wanted a Steering Wheel with that Car? Contemplating New Debit Fees – Bryan Derman writes about how large banks are reacting to the impacts on interchange revenues from the new Durbin regulated interchange rates.

Plus, there was Visa’s announcement in August encouraging the migration of the POS acceptance infrastructure in the US to add EMV and contactless acceptance to the existing mag stripe-based acceptance.

• EMV in the USA: A Mobile Commerce Jump Start. Who is Impacted and How? – Allen Weinberg explores the implications of Visa’s announcement to upgrade merchant acceptance devices in the US to support EMV and contactless cards.

Finally, in the world of non-card based payments, there were other items of note:

• What’s so Special About Business-to-Business (B2B) Payments? – Erin McCune notes that when it comes to payments, transactions between businesses are very different than transactions between businesses and consumers.
• That’s More Like It: NACHA Proposes Same Day ACH – Carol Coye Benson writes about NACHA’s Same Day ACH proposal – cheering it on!
• It’s About Time: clearXchange and Bank P2P – Carol Coye Benson explores the potential of clearXchange for enabling P2P payments.