Recommended Reading: With Friends LIke These
The September 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review has an article by David Yoffie and Mary Kwak titled "With Friends Like These - The Art of Managing Complementors" that's recommended reading. While this article is about the tech industry, the parallels to the US card payments world are striking.
Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, is also a long-time board member of both Intel and Charles Schwab. His article, while it focuses on the example of Intel and Microsoft as complementors, can easily be read thinking in the context of the card payments world.
In the card world that we know in the US, the most obvious example of complementors are the two major card associations -- Visa and MasterCard -- and the two major issuer processors - First Data Corp. and TSYS. Visa's a particularly interesting example where, as part of its debit card strategy over 10 years ago, it launched Visa DPS - a debit card processor that competed with its complementors.
If you can, read the article. Yoffie and Kwak have some great insights from the tech industry that also seem just as relevant to the world of card payments in the US.
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