Next: direct-switched payment processing

Intuit's Dongle-to-Debit Card This is an example of a company/bank partner (Intuit) directly connecting merchants' transactions with card issuers, by-passing traditional payment processors.  Margin for the "house" (Intuit); safety and accounting simplicity for the Merchant.

Uncovering Demand for Switched Ethernet Payment Fabric

ERP & Data Collection in the Food Industry is stuck in a rut until informatics replaces interchange as the next transactional currency. No framework presently exists for to systemically gather and analyze consumer informatics for supply chain participants.  Identifying trails of digital breadcrumbs belonging to individual shoppers as they depart from their grocer is a high-value, albeit obscure byproduct of transactional switch fabrics of the future.

Using plastic to pay Anthem bill? Prepare to lose your coverage

How many databases out there really NEED to have our debit-able bank account numbers?

Using plastic to pay Anthem bill? Prepare to lose your coverage

MasterCard CEO, Top Execs Preview 2012 Strategy & Latest Innovations - pymnts.com

MasterCard CEO, Top Execs Preview 2012 Strategy & Latest Innovations - pymnts.com

New Consulting Blog

Opportunities abound at the intersection of Privacy/Identity Management, Global Switched Ethernet ecosystems and ePayments for Content Centric Networking. This blog now describes my work to share and extent my experience in new directions for my clients.

A few bad apples...

Tracking W.U.'s Exchange Rate Volatility

Affected exchange rate premiums charged by Western Union.

Stay up to date with PPI

Greenlist on Facebook

Payment Pathways on Twitter

Rick O'Brien on LinkedIn

Newsletter on Payment Pathways

Natl. Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Click HERE for details about our recommendations

Robert Reich (Why Washington Isn't Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages)

Robert Reich (Why Washington Isn't Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages)

Unemployed live in the cash economy. It's a universal right to a public, safe ePayment address in the Greenlist to pursue happiness. Can our governmental overlords at least encourage efficient means to migrate payments to electronics and let capitalism take care of the rest?

NEW PPI Links 4 you!

New Website: HERE
New Press Release (May 17, 2011): HERE
New Whitepaper (May 18, 2011): HERE
New Patent (May 17, 2011) : HERE

Black Dub - Our favorite band!

Durbin vs. Tester: Greenlist still succeeds

WSJ Marketwatch Story

Opportunities in the Underbanked Space - Bank 2.0 Briefing

Loyalty, the Social Way - pymnts.com

Loyalty, the Social Way - pymnts.com

Illustrative Graphics for our Greenlist Patent

Download Today's Press Release: HERE

Download Patent: HERE

Pay Anywhere, Anytime from Any Device?

Does the Financial Reform Act help or hinder the creation of new economic models in payments? Does a registry of payment addresses need to be neutrally positioned and open?

Summit Candy - Denali 1980

Soundtracks: Dropkick Murphys & Faure's Requiem

The Long Trudge

First Night on West Butress Route on Denali

Approach and Landing on Denali

Skype brings White Christmas, Kyle's B-day to Tim in Beige Iraq

We miss you, Tim!

Our resident poet/songriter, Mike Birch

Still as relevant today as it was in the early '80's!

Rock on, Mike!

Mobile Year in Review

greatest train story ever told

Trixie Whitley / Daniel Lanois: Black Dub

Black Dub - I Believe In You [Radio Edit]

What it is & Why we did it.

A Fighting Chance

"If I had more time..." Mark Twain

Compass Rose: Trusted Coordinates

Crossing the Divide

Greenlist® Debuts

PRESS RELEASE: HERE

A Permanent Mark

Our patent's claims are allowed! We filed it provisionally back on Feb. 28, 2003 and the final version was filed on Feb. 26, 2004. Seven long years.

AN ENHANCED SYSTEM FOR ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFER AND ELIMINATION OF PAYEE’S NEED FOR ENCRYPTION AND PRIVACY

ITS CLAIMS:

1. A computer-implemented method for conducting financial transactions over a network of payment networks, comprising: associating a unique identifier with one or more payment addresses of an account and a holder of said account, said account residing at a financial institution and said associated payment addresses of said account configured to allow withdrawals by said account holder only and to allow a plurality of deposits to be made at different times; making said unique identifier available to users of an Internet portal or search engine without requiring a password or log-in; receiving data over said network of payment networks identifying one or more non-repudiable deposits to be made to said account; assigning said one or more non-repudiable deposits to said account using any one of said payment addresses associated with said unique identifier; and notifying on a real-time basis a depositor of said deposit of said assigning of said one or more non-repudiable deposits to said account, wherein the directory functions as a root directory for real-time synchronizing content with other directories containing a plurality of unique identifiers associated with a plurality of accounts residing at a plurality of financial institutions.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the directory associates the account holder with the financial institution.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the directory is in communication with and operable to be queried by a portal system to make deposits directly to the account associated with said unique identifier.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein the directory is in communication with and operable to be queried by a portal system to withdraw funds from a depositor's account and deposit the funds directly into the account associated with said unique identifier.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the directory is maintained by a credit or debit card provider.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the account is linked to a standard financial account.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 6, wherein funds are transferred automatically in real-time from the account to the standard financial account.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the financial institution is a credit or debit card provider.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein funds are deposited into the account from a merchant or service provider that accepts

10. The system of claim 1, wherein said Internet portal is associated with said financial institution.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein said Internet portal is available to a portable computing device.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein said portable computing device comprises a mobile telephone.

13. The method of claim 1, further comprising aggregating said registrations by said plurality of registrars.

Why Change Now?

José De Francisco López poses an interesting question.

An Overwhelming Opportunity

Another fine song from PPI's resident songwriter

This could be our theme song for 2010!

Greenlist Datasheet now available

Datasheet Sept. 10, 2009

Greenlist now trademarked in China

The Innovator's Dilemma

If we don't build Greenlist, someone else certainly will, so we should do the deal rather than let others benefit.

Angel investors and bank partners thought that way.

Pilot banks and their debit network collaborator recently postponed their services launch for fear of being left out on a limb alone. Instead of being acutely aware of the risks, we need to understand how systems thrive despite the risks.

We now must accumulate successful implementations with larger, more confident bank-registrars and other institutions rather than become completely crippled by failure. We cannot risk partnering exclusively with just one kind of registrar. Decoupling this principle insures we will survive any failures derivative of that strategy.

How do we make long-term risk and results more visible so that people can understand it better?

Season's Greetings from Payment Pathways

This will be a tough Christmas for many poor and homeless people in Chicago and throughout the United States. In place of sending cards Payment Pathways has made an equivalent donation to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

(This organization is tackling homelessness and enabling people to shape their future and rebuild their lives)

Supreme Attention

Justices to study Business Methods patents: article here

A Career Begins...

PPI congratulates Tim O'Brien

on his USAF BootCamp Graduation with Honors

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dollar Bank now visibly sponsoring survey

Link: HERE for

Dollar Bank's "Managing your Bank Account and Payments" survey.

Please help us get the word out to social nets.

Change Agents

Strategic Investors warming up to PPI

The market is shifting to where PPI has Greenlist positioned.

Consumers and small business people are voicing their needs to their bankers.

The Hardnose Rule for Hardnose Bankers

Problem: How can Greenlist get to scale without simultaneously attracting every bank to become a registrar?
Answer: Permit consumers to register themselves directly, a la Paypal.
Tactic: Invite all Paypal users via their chat rooms, etc.
Explanation: Primary tenet of Greenist is its utter safety of resolving identifiers into routable bank payment addresses THAT CAN NOT BE DEBITED.
Solution: Restrict access to query the Greenlist to participating banks' web portals. Banks obtaining access must guarantee that any ACH numbers listed will NEVER be debited by their payment engine.

What bankers fear the most

Another bank selling services to their customers that they would have been able to offer had they been paying attention.

Star Financial Bank

Read about Ralph Marcuccili: here

This institution will continue to make news in the months ahead.

The Mobile Dimension

By some estimates, over the next couple of years more than 1 billion people will log in to the Internet for the first time, and most of these log-ins will be via mobile devices (like cell phones) and located in emerging countries. It is also estimated that by 2010, one in three Africans will own a mobile phone. With almost 280 million subscribers in Africa alone, mobile phones are recognized as instruments of change in finance, agriculture, media and, development work.

A recent Gartner report states that the number of mobile payment users worldwide is forecast to reach 73.4 million this year, says Gartner, up 70.4 percent from 2008 when there were 43.1 million users. The research firm predicts that the figure will reach more than 190 million in 2012, representing more than 3 percent of total mobile users worldwide. "Momentum in the mobile payment market gathered further in 2008 with a number of high-profile launches of mobile money transfer services in multiple markets, participation of major global institutions in near-field communication (NFC) payment trials, as well as new payment solutions entering the market," said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner. She noted, however, that security concerns, regulatory issues, and an inadequate 'ecosystem' were still holding back growth in the sector.

Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using a mobile technology such as SMS, WAP, USSD or NFC. In terms of both number of users and transaction volumes, Gartner expects Asia-Pacific (including Japan) to maintain the largest share of the market. While mobile payment penetration in Western Europe is expected to rise from 0.9 percent in 2009 to 2.5 percent in 2012, and from 1.7 percent to 3 percent in North America; penetration in Asia-Pacific will rise from 2 percent in 2009 to 3.8 percent in 2012. Mobile payment penetration in EMEA and Latin America is also expected to exceed 3 percent by 2012.

1 year $10B Japanese bank turnaround

Read about PPI's shareholder, Steve Monaghan: HERE

"Naked Credit Transfers"

Pulse has informed PPI and two banks that member banks can be certified to send and receive credit transfers that are not preceded by debits.