Perspectives: George Peabody
Square Rolls Out Flat Fee Pricing
by: George Peabody, Mercator Advisory Group
8/17/2012
Square announced Aug. 16 a new pricing scheme with a flat fee of $275 per month for merchants making less than $250,000 in annual card payments through the Square service. For a merchant running close to that gross volume, the...
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The ETA Goes Mobile
by: George Peabody
8/10/2012
The Electronic Transacticon Association is jumping into the middle of one of the most important and challenging questions for the payments industry. How should mobile payments evolve? The ETA has formed the Mobile Payments Committee, which includes the four leading...
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Google Wallet Gets a Big Update
by: George Peabody
8/2/2012
Google Wednesday updated its Wallet capability with significant changes. Instead of just a few Citi cards and Google's own prepaid card, Google Wallet now allows any card to be added to its mobile wallet. Looking a lot more like PayPal,...
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Sprint Touch, Google Wallet, and Access to the Consumer
by: George Peabody
6/14/2012
Watching the mobile wallet space is like watching a meteor shower. Each bright light that flashes has its own unique trajectory, but they're all coming from the same general area and they're all headed in the same general direction. To...
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Payment Context Will Matter as Much as Ubiquity
by: George Peabody
4/27/2012
This year’s lively Electronic Transaction Association Annual Meeting and Expo had just concluded and an issue frequently raised in conversation with attendees, especially from payments industry incumbents, was ubiquity, the property of a payment method’s widespread, if not universal, acceptance....
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Payment Methods Never Die, and May Not Fade Away
by: George Peabody
4/23/2012
In its recent “The Future of Money in a Mobile Age” report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a strong compilation of data sources as well as the results of its own survey of technologists on the...
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AisleBuyer Acquisition Strengthens Intuit
by: George Peabody
4/11/2012
The battleground for the mobile consumer’s connection to the merchant has expanded. Line busting, mobile self checkout company AisleBuyer has just been acquired by Intuit. AisleBuyer has been out a few years, offering merchants an in store way to let...
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Bitcoin is Not Disruptive Either
by: George Peabody
3/27/2012
A recent Forbes blog post, by contributor Jon Matonis, takes Square and PayPal to task as “not disruptive enough” innovations in the payments system. It’s true that neither goes around the existing rails of the card brands, processors, and financial...
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2D Barcodes Don’t Suck, But Aren’t Perfect
by: George Peabody
2/14/2012
Technology purists, especially those backing NFC, look askance at the lowly 2D barcode. How could something so simple compare favorably to a hardware based scheme designed for such a wide range of applications as physical world navigation, payments security, physical...
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