As Sam Cooke sang: “It’s been a long time comin’ … but I know a change is gonna come.” Commerce changes slowly, at a glacial pace, it seems, until — all of a sudden — things are different. Aisles give way to clicks, and cash gives way...
The term “thinking outside the box” originates from advice that puzzle management consultants famously gave to clients in the 1970s and 1980s to encourage creative thinking. Called the “nine dots” puzzle, the trick was to connect all nine dots in the puzzle with four straight lines, without tracing...
Tokenization is a buzzword within payments. And as commerce becomes ever more mobile — connecting devices in store, online, or an amalgamation of the two — one industry participant says that payments should brace for a tidal wave of tokens. Billions of these tokens have...
Back in the good old days of healthcare, the employer paid for all (or most) of the freight, and the out-of-pockets for consumers were tiny — about 5 percent. When patients didn’t pay (and many didn’t to the tune of $60 billion in write-offs annually), it...
A few weeks from now will mark the 72nd anniversary of a federal court decision that found grocery store chain The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and its founders, George and John Hartford, guilty of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. That story is the subject of a...
The payments world could very well be living in the Upside Down. The Upside Down is the fictional parallel universe controlled by a hive mind and humanoid predators called Demogorgons, made popular by the 2016 Netflix smash hit “Stranger Things.” The Upside Down looked sort...
Seven years ago, Gusto Co-founder and CEO Josh Reeves wasn’t thinking about how he could disrupt the payroll industry. He wasn’t really thinking about payroll at all, he told Karen Webster in a recent conversation. He was thinking about the human brain. “I was an...
Facebook-owned WhatsApp is still working towards approval from the Indian government to officially launch its payment service across the country. In February, WhatsApp launched a payments feature in India that now has around one million users. The app is in the process of fixing any issues...
Paul McCartney and The Beatles may have told us that money can’t buy us love, but new research claims that it can certainly buy us happiness. And how much money consumers need to be happy. A recent Gallup World Poll tells us consumers whose households earn...
