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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?
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.
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...
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.
Merchant & POS
In the first post I explained what closed-loop payment systems are and how they differ from open-loop ones. Many of the replies I received boiled down to one question: how do these systems actually work behind the scenes once a QR code is scanned?
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...
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...
Debit Card
A type of smart card containing a microchip and simple software, which performs contactless reading when brought close to a smart card reader. It isn't linked to a bank account and has no credit limit like credit cards. You can spend up to the amount loaded onto the card...
Payment Institutions & E-Money
On 7 October 2023, the CBRT amended the Communiqué on Information Systems of Payment and E-Money Institutions and Data Sharing Services of Payment Service Providers, first published on 1 December 2021. Links to the new text, a comparison table and a detailed summary of changes follow.
Payment Systems
As part of the first-phase work of the Digital Turkish Lira Project led by the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT), the first payments on the Digital Turkish Lira Network were successfully carried out. The CBRT will continue its closed-loop pilot tests in the first quarter of 2023.
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.
Payment Systems
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is a next-generation protocol that lets AI agents integrate directly into commercial processes such as payments, orders, refunds and subscriptions. This post explains how it works and what it offers businesses.