Andy Orrock | Payment Systems

Bumper Sticker Sighting #2

Spotted on the car in front of me last night on the way to do take-out at Ash Malik’s excellent Chaat Cafe here in Dallas, TX:

“I refuse to participate in a recession.”

The Paneer Wrap at Chaat is a must.

Subscribe to Mikey Allen's Daily Playbook

Suffering from election withdrawal like me?  Here’s a tip:  Subscribe to Mike Allen’s Playbook (part of the excellent Politico website) by e-mail.  Every morning (and I mean EVERY morning – Christmas, New Year’s, whatever) you get an awesome mix of top news, inside-the-Beltway scuttlebutt and ‘hat tips’ (acknowledgements from Mike to his legion of stealth spotters of birthdays, anniversaries, political curiosities, eye-raisers and head-scratchers).  It’s so good it ought to be a forbidden pleasure.  Newsweek recently called him “The Beltway’s Man Who Never Sleeps.”  Read that piece because it gets right to the heart and energy of the guy as well as to what makes his work so damn good.  It’s the first thing I read every morning.

Coby Schanz: Renaissance Man!

My friend Coby Schanz is a true Renaissance Man.  I got to know him originally through his role as an IT consultant.  He’s a well-known expert on important OLTP subject matters, most notably disaster recovery solutions.  I used to be the operations manager for the payment switch that processed all card-based transactions for the 76 and Circle K brands.  Coby implemented a disaster recovery solution for us.  His genius is to take very thorny mission-critical concepts and implement them cleanly and simply. 

I always like to measure ‘mean time to payback’ on our technology purchases.  Coby’s products are always league-toppers in that regard.  You can get them up and running with very little lead time.  You configure one very well-documented table, and off you go.   

Beyond the technology grind, Coby’s also a full-fledged lawyer, a mad keen windsurfer, and a very talented and accomplished musician.  His music is really great.  Check it out here.  He writes the songs, plays all the parts, and has even produced his own video of his rockin’ song “Only You.”

Coby, how many hours are in your day?  It must be longer than mine!

Gift cards shift eCommerce peaks to December 26th

We watched massive volumes of gift card activations course through our OLS.Switch acquirer implementations yesterday.  In our bricks and mortar implementations we’re handling activations, deactivations and refreshes of cards picked from these ubiquitous ‘Gift Card Malls’ that have sprouted up around the endcaps of major retailers everywhere. 

While our peak day was December 24th, what this means for eCommerce providers is that the peak shifts to December 26th, when card usage starts.  This year, the usage surge ought to be especially spiky on December 26th.  We have a Friday jammed in the middle of Christmas and a weekend.  Many people have taken the day off to manufacture a nice four-day break.

While the hardcore shoppers head out to the malls, people like me are looking to get into the buying spirit while staying close to home.  So, it’s gotta suck to be working IT for The Gap right now.  These Gap.com and BananaRepublic.com screens reflect what me and other people have been experiencing over the past couple of hours:  A complete eCommerce outage: 

Analysts talk about ‘Cyber Monday’, but I bet December 26th is the peak eCommerce buying day this year.

Bumper Sticker Sighting

Today I traveled behind a car with the following bumper sticker:

“I can only please one person a day.  Today I choose…ME.”

Wordle’s view of my blogging

Dave pointed me to Wordle, a neat little implementation by Jonathan Feinberg.  It creates “beautiful word clouds” of your postings.  Here’s what it created for me:

Nice work, Jonathan!

Forum Letter of the Month

Please take a look at Dave’s post about our upcoming appearance at the 2008 ATM, Debit and Prepaid Forum, October 5th through 7th in Chandler, AZ (suburb of Phoenix).  My OLS colleague Hugh Bursi is doing the hard work right now putting together the various aspects of our Gold Sponsor-level presence.  You can see the Gold-level has the power threesome of MasterCard, Discover…and OLS.  Heady company.

Now Blogging With Windows Live Writer

I’m taking part in Six Apart’s new TypePad Blog Tune-Up Service.  One of the things they noticed in their review is my bad habit of occasionally copying things in from Word.  This is causing some problems because, as the tune-up report notes “Copying content from Word will cause formatting problems, error messages, and feed validation problems. The issue with Microsoft Word formatting code is not unique to TypePad's Rich Text Editor. Any editor that copies over formatting will cause issues such as this -because the code that Microsoft Word inserts is not web-compatible.”

So, I’m taking the Tune-up team’s suggestion by blogging with Windows Live Writer.  So far, I’m impressed.  The download was easy and the integration into IE is seamless.  I just started writing immediately without any feelings of disorientation.

Dave's Productivity

Now I know why my OLS colleague Dave Bergert is so productive: the quad-core processor in his brain is hovering over all those machines dividing up his work cycles so that he's coding transaction simulators on one device, fixing production problems on another, chatting with me on Skype on a third, setting up PABP Audit environments on a fourth, doing jPOS commits on a fifth...

jPOS Created Here

That's the desktop where the world's best payment systems infrastructure gets created.  I'm grateful to play a role in the world Alejandro has created.

In other news, it looks like we'll top 5,000 store locations today - or, by latest, next Tuesday - at our flagship OLS.Switch installation.  It's been a long time getting those 1,800 new stores on-boarded, but our client got some serious momentum over the last couple of months.  The last store gets converted on Friday, May 30th.

Now featured on Glenbrook's Payment News

Glenbrook Partners' excellent Payment News site now features a new page that provides its readers a "current summary of the latest content from some of our favorite payments and banking blogs based upon their RSS feeds."  Dave, Alejandro and I appear on the list.  Our thanks to Glenbrook's Scott Loftesness, who put out the call and compiled the list.

Hello, Cracow

Part of what motivates my blog-writing is the readership I get from around the world.  Thanks so much for your interest. 

One reader - or group of readers - holds some special interest at the moment: those from Cracow, Poland.  My OLS colleague, Dave Bergert, will be in Cracow from late June through mid-July.  He'd love to meet up while there with anyone interested in chatting about jPOS, payment systems, and specifically payment systems security.  Though the last topic is Dave's specific area of expertise, he's done a wide range of payment systems projects, both issuer- and acquirer-side, and is a great resource.  To set something up, you can contact Dave here.