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Payment Systems
How do banks fund so many points, bonuses, and discounts? This post explains the credit card profitability model: merchant commissions, interchange, interest income, installments, and why campaigns are an investment in transaction volume rather than a cost.
Closed-Loop Payments
Is Starbucks really selling coffee, or building an ecosystem? Prepaid balances, a loyalty program and customer data turn a coffee chain's payments into a closed-loop economy, a very different model from Istanbulkart.
Closed-Loop Payments
In the final post of the closed-loop payments series, the common question behind cards, QR payments, and prepaid balances comes into focus: who manages the customer relationship, and whose ecosystem does the customer stay in?
Payment Systems
The Hidden Side of the Payments World. The words a person working in the payment systems industry hears most over a career are probably Visa, Mastercard, POS, debit card, virtual POS, acquiring and card issuing. Frankly, my own career did not unfold very differently from that journey...
Merchant & POS
A virtual POS is a payment platform that enables online payments by credit or debit card. Banks also give merchants interfaces for mail order, pre-authorization, cancellations and refunds.
General
Who will win in Agentic Commerce? Owning the customer used to be a huge advantage. Once an agent starts deciding on the customer's behalf, where does the real power move to?
EMV
The AID tells the terminal which applications are present on a chip during a POS or ATM transaction. What does the AID do? It lets the terminal determine whether it supports an application on the chip. In Tag 9F06, it is 5-16 digits long.
Agentic Commerce
The next customer on the internet may not be human. If AI agents become part of purchasing decisions, the rules of e-commerce, marketing, and payment systems could change.
Closed-Loop Payments
Is Alipay a payment system, or a digital economy? In the previous post we discussed how Starbucks shows that payment systems can evolve into a different structure. At first the goal was to make payment easier for the customer. As the system grew, loyalty programs...
Payment Systems
When Does a Transit Card Become a Payment System? Millions of people in Istanbul use Istanbulkart every day. Passing through metro turnstiles, rushing to a bus or boarding a ferry at the last moment, our hand reaches almost by reflex for our card or our phone...
Payment Systems
If users start describing their needs instead of searching for products, one of the internet economy's most fundamental habits could change.
Credit Card
An affinity card is a type of credit card issued by a bank that carries the logo of a social organization such as an association, foundation, sports club, or charity (for example, Fenerbahce Bonus). It is similar in structure to a co-branded card.