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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.
Credit Card
Time-limited credit card campaigns look attractive, but their rules hide pitfalls. Three real-world cases show why transactions fail to count toward points, and how to avoid it by reading the terms carefully.
Credit Card
Ali joined a bank's “shop 4 times at merchant X and earn Y TL” campaign. Fifteen days after being told 40 TL had been loaded onto his card, the merchant told him he had no points left. Here is what went wrong.
Agentic Commerce
Points or habit? Loyalty programs are built on steering human behavior. But if an AI agent starts shopping on our behalf, do points and campaigns still work the same way?
Merchant & POS
In payment systems, every exchange between POS devices and bank or payment institution systems runs on a specific messaging standard, generally based on ISO 8583. However, each country, bank, or switch network defines its own version of this standard.
Merchant & POS
Mobile phones are entering our lives more every day. One study found people forget their wallets more often than their phones. This post explains how to buy fuel with TOTAL Mobile Payment and BKM Express without getting out of the car.
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.
Credit Card
At first glance, a credit card seems like a product offered for cardholders' use and benefit, but it also provides significant benefits to merchants, from faster cash flow to collection security and new customers.
Agentic Commerce
Are We Ready to Give an AI Agent the Authority to Make Payments? Having long looked at complaint and dispute processes in payment systems, I think granting an agent payment authority is far different from research or product selection.
Closed-Loop Payments
Why does a coffee chain build its own loyalty program, and why does a payment app keep adding services? This post looks at how loyalty, data, and new services drive the growth of closed-loop payment systems, and at the financial layers behind that growth.
Payment Systems
Card type information is used in card schemes such as MasterCard, Visa, and TROY. The card types and card type codes used in the Visa system include Credit, Prepaid, Debit, Deferred Debit, and Charge Card.
Credit Card
A prepaid card is a customized chip or chipless card that is not linked to a bank account and has no credit limit like a credit card. You can only spend up to the amount loaded onto the card.