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Merchant & POS
Loyalty points are promotional rewards banks give customers for credit card transactions, tracked on a card/customer basis. Banks charge merchants a commission on POS transactions, and some share part of that commission with cardholders as points.
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
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?
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
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.
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
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
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...
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?
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.
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...