Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft each briefly enjoyed a market capitalization greater than $1 trillion. The two dominant global payment networks, Mastercard and Visa, aspire to join this august, and for the moment, memberless club. In the near term, the networks could grow on autopilot. However, inevitably diminishing retail-payments growth in …
Read More »COMMENTARY: Adyen And the New Age of Global Payments Processing: Part II
Adyen touts its omnichannel approach. It has integrated e-commerce with in-store sales, for example, at hip men’s clothier Bonobos. The Dutch processor’s growth locomotive, however, is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, e-commerce. While not enjoying Mastercard’s network power, Adyen has built platform economics by credentialing and securely integrating …
Read More »COMMENTARY: Adyen And the New Age of Global Payments Processing: Part I
Dutch payments processor Adyen N.V. is in the limelight just as the payments business has gotten hot. Ant Financial just raised the biggest private funding round ever—$14 billion at a $150 billion valuation, in part on the back of its Alipay unit. These are new and nontraditional entrants. The old …
Read More »COMMENTARY: Why You Shouldn’t Count on Real-Time ACH for Retail Payments
A demand-deposit account is the anchor liquidity instrument for most consumers and businesses. For some members of the unbanked, it’s a GPR-prepaid-card account. Policymakers and commercial actors are moving to enable real-time payments between DDAs at thousands of U.S. banks. Policymakers aim to improve payment-system efficiency and enable new and …
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