In the US, tower companies have enjoyed a 20-year growth tailwind that shows no signs of fatigue. The population of wireless subscribers has grown at a high single digit rate, from fewer than 130mn in 2001 to 440mn in 2018. In turn, network standards have evolved – from 2G (voice, SMS; 2000-2006) to 3G (mobile […]
Related posts [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 1 [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 2 In 2016, six years and several pro-competition pieces of regulation after the Central Bank of Brazil and antitrust authorities first pried the merchant acquiring market open to […]
Related posts: [Wix – Wix.com] Scaling profitably (November 2017) [GDDY – GoDaddy; VRSN – Verisign; EIGI – Endurance International] Value Migration in Web Services (May 2018) When I started looking into Wix more than two years ago, its capabilities seemed far beyond those of Weebly, Square Space, and several other competing site builders I was […]
Like Tom Hanks sustaining dialog with a Wilson volleyball, I sometimes let myself believe that my words mean more to my readers than is certainly the case. For most of you, scuttleblurb is just one of many resources you consume to get smarter about companies. But for me, a guy who reads and writes most […]
If you follow the payments space even casually, you are no doubt aware of the sequence of the mega mergers that have taken place between merchant acquirers and core processors this past year. Source: scuttleblurb and public filings The bolded companies in the table above are the surviving merged entities, their market caps and enterprise […]
Having covered merchant acquirers and card networks, I’m down to the final part of the payment edifice – issuer processors. Issuer processors are to card issuing banks what merchant acquirers are to merchants. They authorize and process transactions on behalf of card issuing banks under long-term agreements and recognize revenue based on a combination of […]
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 […]