In the payments space, the difference between a distributor and a competitor can be so blurry as to lose functional meaning. Mercury Payment was a significant ISO for legacy acquirers before Vantiv acquired it from Silver Lake.  Stripe offers many of the same services as the legacy acquirers to whom it outsources transaction processing.  Ditto […]

This is Part 1 of what I expect will be a 3-part series on merchant acquirers and issuer-side payment processors [edit: 4-part series!].  It describes the basic mechanics of the merchant acquisition model and delves into how incumbent players like First Data, Global Payments, and Worldpay got to where they were prior the flurry of […]

Your empty aluminum cans are collected and transported to a recycling center, where they are combined with other aluminum cans and crushed into a giant bale.  That bale is shredded into scraps.  Those scraps are melted down into a liquid that is poured into molds buried 10 meters underground and cast into massive 27-ton blocks, […]

Related posts: [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the rails, Part 1 [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the rails, Part 2 How many companies are still posting consistent double-digit organic revenue growth doing essentially the same thing that they’ve done for the last 60 years? I can only think of two. Visa […]

If I had to force rank industries most resistant to new technology, P&C insurance would be right up there with other notoriously innovation averse sectors like local government, life insurance, education, and healthcare.  To some extent, this makes sense.  Given the critical nature of their services, insurance carriers should be culturally biased towards minimizing downside […]

That TransDigm, a proprietary, sole-sourced parts provider with a business model narrowly designed to maximize shareholder value should, well, produce tons of shareholder value, is perhaps unsurprising.  That HEICO, with an opposing value creation ethos, generates comparable returns on capital selling generic PMA parts, is less intuitive.  A PMA part is an aircraft or engine […]

The diffuse nature of LiveRamp’s solution makes it hard to understand, so I thought I’d revisit a few points from my last LiveRamp post.  Here again is the marketer’s challenge: “When you walk into a Nordstrom and purchase a bow tie, the details of that transaction will be stored in a database alongside the phone […]

In this post, I offer thoughts on the Muddy Waters’ report.  Some of its claims were valid, some were innocuous, and a few seemed so obviously flawed as to be postulated in bad faith.  I was surprised by how readily the write-up was received as gospel truth.  Twitter was inundated with self-loathing from former Burford […]