Sunday, October 19, 2008

Learn to read between the lines...

I was just reading my daily Finextra newsletter and came across an article with the following headline - "WorldPay merchants to offer PayPal and RevolutionCard". (http://www.finextra.com/fullpr.asp?id=24007) Of course Marketing 101 says this is what you should do, create a provocative headline. However, the devil is in the details. Many people would read this and assume that automatically and overnight tens of thousands of merchants are all of a sudden going to be taking these new payment types. In fact that is not even close to the truth. The article itself actually was reasonable about this by saying "allows WorldPay clients to offer" but to someone not close enough to understand, even this can often be taken out of context. There have been dozens of articles about Revolution card that claim they are getting close to a million merchants. In fact, I doubt there are even 10% of those that are actually accepting it. For any merchant, both ecommerce and retail, to take a new payment type, they have to seriously consider a lot of issues such as; cost, reconcilement issues, shopping cart abandonment due to confusion or access, customer service training, programming costs, etc... It is really challenging to create a new payment brand. I have witnessed both success and failure such as Discover Card, BillMeLater and PayByTouch, BitPass respectively. It is very hard for any company trying this type of endeavor to avoid the tendency to create smoke and mirrors during the chicken and egg phase but this lack of transparency has led to a lot of skepticism. My advice - make sure you do a little deeper investigation before you leap.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

It's Official, I am now at Vindicia

As of Monday, I am the SVP of BD for Vindicia. Here is a little background on what the company does;
Vindicia offers on-demand billing solutions for recurring and real-time payments, coupled with fraud screening and chargeback management. Our expertise and focus is around sale and delivery of digital goods. Here is a recent press release: http://vindicia.com/news/Press.html?release_id=280