Comparing North American and European PayFacs in 2024
General Commentary & Highlights In North America, 16% of the payfacs registered today are new since Mar ’23. However, 5% of the payfacs from Mar ’23 were unregistered by Jan ’24, a 6% annual attrition rate. In the EU & UK, 14% of the payfacs registered today are new since Mar ’23, on the other […]
Mastering Omnichannel Payments
PayPal Challenged by Growth Headwinds
General Commentary & Highlights PayPal’s stock dropped 9% after PayPal issued low guidance and warned of a transition year. PayPal’s account numbers fell for the first time while net revenue remained disappointingly flat, in part due to ongoing price pressure (net take rate declined by more than 50 bps since 2019). PayPal’s recent strategy to […]
Global Card Scheme Performance FY 2023
General Commentary & Highlights Visa and Mastercard both had another year of strong performance on the back of healthy growth in consumer spending and cross-border volumes. Cross-border continues to drive volume growth, though growth slowed from 22% to 16% for Visa and 31% to 18% for Mastercard between Dec.’22-23 and Dec.’21-22, respectively.Visa and Mastercard card […]
Still Work to Be Done for Next-Gen Issuer Processors Seeking to Capture the Embedded Finance Opportunity
Regardless of the wide variance in definitions for the term “embedded finance” (which Flagship defines in detail in an article here), most market participants can agree on the need to quantify how big embedded finance actually is today, and what its trajectory is towards obtaining its (typically huge) theoretical market size. This article seeks to […]
Digital Euro: Digitalizing the Eurozone Payment Ecosystem
This article is part II of our Central Bank Digital Currencies series. For more insights, please refer to Part I: Demystifying CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) here.
Press Release: Ben Brown Joins Flagship Advisory Partners to Strengthen Growth & Innovation Capabilities
Annapolis, MD – Flagship Advisory Partners, the leading global boutique strategy consulting and M&A advisory firm focused on payments and fintech, is pleased to announce the addition of Ben Brown as a Partner, based in our Annapolis, MD office.
Most Read Flagship Insights of 2023
In 2023, Flagship published insights across a wide range of payment and fintech topics. The scope and scale of Apple’s fintech ecosystem, in parallel with our analysis of fintech’s efficiency, generated the most traction amongst our readers. Other topics that gathered attention were our definition of the widely used catchphrase ‘embedded finance’, KKR’s failed investment […]
Infographic: 6 Years after the EU Launch of Apple Pay, over 44% of Europeans use Mobile Wallets
General Commentary & Highlights A mobile wallet is a payment tool that stores the user’s payment credentials on a mobile device, which can be used to pay in stores and/or remotely (incl. person-to-person and C2B mobile commerce The prevalence of mobile wallets has risen in Europe, stemming from tech advancements in acceptance, heavy presence of […]
The Rise and Fall of the Apple-Goldman Sachs Consumer Finance Partnership
The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Nov. 28 that “Apple is pulling the plug on its credit-card partnership with Goldman Sachs” caps off months of highly public news about the dissolution of Goldman’s entry into consumer financial services. In this article, Flagship estimates the profitability of the Apple Card program, which we believe is the […]