Aben
MarketingOS that alerts, executes, & measures ROI from proprietary card + POS data. Aben means open in Danish, and we’re sticklers for transparency.
Adhering to data science principles on day one, Aben was founded on the idea that the data available to the largest enterprises should be democratized for all businesses to leverage. Through our proprietary data and machine learning algorithms, we have established a single truth through real world spend across local markets, complete with recommendations, marketing automation, and measurement for
14/02/2023
How Third Party Delivery Will Forever Change Merchant Marketing in A Good Way (Part 1) Third party ordering and delivery (3PD) companies – UberEats, Grubhub, et. al – have been painted as predatory monsters that feast on the very customers (restaurants) that they purport …
09/02/2023
The Card Networks Need to Let Everyone Become A Stripe International legislating bodies have it out for the card networks, and the US is finally catching up. And we can understand why. Payments is an esoteric contraption yet seems to make a lot of mone…
07/02/2023
Where We See Toast Winning and Losing in The Restaurant Org Chart Today By all measures, Toast has built a successful business, even if it was not terribly capital efficient. Their core POS is arguably the best SMB restaurant product on the market, their pace of execut…
25/01/2023
With Subway Leaving Olo, Does Onosys Get Acquired? Olo’s stock apparently flirted with lifetime lows as news broke that Subway would be taking its 20,000 store footprint off Rails, Olo’s integrated product to third party delivery provid…
17/01/2023
Card Linked Offers Are A S**t Business. Here’s How to Fix It Card linked offers are an esoteric marketing channel that holds great promise, if only they could be wrestled away from the banks that publish the offers. Card linked offers work like such. A consu…
10/01/2023
Like Online Ordering, CDP Is Now Table Stakes Infrastructure. Both Should be Much Cheaper. If the pandemic made one thing abundantly clear it’s that retailers (especially restaurants) were significantly underinvested in digitization. And it’s no surprise: surveys have showed …
03/01/2023
Cannabis Retailers Are Bankrupting Themselves with Delivery. Here’s How to Do It Right. We’re admittedly new to the cannabis industry, but that doesn’t mean that we’re incompetent. One thing we’ve noticed is that dispensaries seem to be copacetic with losing to…
11/11/2022
Worldpay Cuts Residuals to Inactive Mercury ISOs We have no idea how widespread this is. It looks to be triggered on old Mercury ISOs (who Vantiv acquired and then Worldpay acquired and then FIS acquired). Few thoughts. We love how this note was …
02/11/2022
Observations of The Cannabis POS Landscape, Including Payments Nonsense We recently started getting into cannabis (or more commonly termed MRB for marijuana-related business) as it turns out that data + data science + card network data works pretty much everywhere. The…
01/11/2022
Touchbistro Raises $150M To Upgrade Tech and Reach IPO Touchbistro recently closed a $150M round of mixed equity and structured debt, intended to carry the company to an eventual IPO. Touchbistro has been preparing itself to become a publicly listed en…
28/10/2022
NCR Increasing Cloud POS Fees by 8.5% While this is totally NCR’s prerogative, and the past two US administrations have created record inflation (though it started with Bernanke in 2008), we struggle to understand all the increas…
20/10/2022
CDP Is A Feature, Not A Company: CDP’s Evolution + How to Evaluate Long Term Alignment (Part 3 of 3) In the previous article in this series we discussed the types of CDPs that should be considered based upon the type of business you are. In this last article we’ll discuss the evolution of CD…
11/10/2022
Types of CDPs: Offline Merchants Must Choose One That Fits Their Business Needs (Part 2 of 3) In our previous article we introduced the concept of CDP, who needs it, and the use cases for having one. Now we’ll delve into the types of CDPs (hint: they’re not all the same) to help…
04/10/2022
As Brick and Mortar Merchants Fawn over CDP, They’re Missing The Big Picture (Part 1 of 3) If there’s ever been a hot acronym (particularly in the restaurant industry) it’s CDP: customer data platform. We’ve written about this before, but CDP is a glorified database. Th…
27/09/2022
Fiserv, NCR Call It Quits? A long time ago NCR Aloha would allow processors to integrate into their POS software through their EDC, or electronic data capture service, as a defacto gateway. As NCR grew smarter they struck pr…
20/09/2022
Infinicept Spearheads Landmark Framework for Payfacs, Summed As: “Don’t Payments Bro Me” It’s rare to find someone in the payments ecosystem that’s aligned on fairness and transaparency. In fact, those two nouns are polar opposite of how the whole of the payment ecosystem m…
02/08/2022
Reforming Retail Honest guidance for navigating the offline world
26/07/2022
Shift4 Acquiring As Many Resellers As Possible with Teethy Non-Compete? Since going public Shift4 has seemed to expedite their reliance on nonsense to increase revenues. Yet the company’s thesis is that they can take large gateway customers and convert them into …
19/07/2022
19/07/2022
The Full Scoop on Olo Pay In case you haven’t heard, Olo built a payments product. How did we get here? When consumers interact with a restaurant on their digital device, they are almost always guided to an Olo product when…
14/07/2022
Our Guest Appearance on The Spoon Podcast: Misery of Restaurant Tech, Toast, Payments, Web3 We hopped on a podcast with our friend Michael Wolf, founder of The Spoon. You can read a summary of the content we discussed here, and listen here. High level we chatted about the false allure of …
12/07/2022
The No Man’s Land of Retail: How Merchants with 5 – 50 Units Are Trapped Investors don’t like companies that sell to retailers. Period. Long sales cycles, unsophisticated buyers (which cause the long sales cycles), and low margins are a death trap. In fact Toast c…
28/06/2022
Most Surchargers Aren’t Paying Correct Taxes. Will This Undo Surcharging? Every payments bro out there wants their merchants to surcharge. Why? Cuz free money for the payments bro (this should actually read even MORE free money for the payments bro who does nothing to ea…
07/06/2022
To Catch A Predator: Payments Edition You might recall our Payments SOS series that outed the unethical behavior of payment processors. Well, as payment processors all buy each other to wring out costs and find growth (which is hard to…
24/05/2022
DoorDash Capital, Bbot Acquisition Just A Layover to Full Restaurant POS Offering As DoorDash adds capital lending to its product offering, we think this is just a collision course with POS. DoorDash needs to grow pretty dramatically to satiate investors, and there are really th…
17/05/2022
Why You Should Never, Ever Short Public Payments Companies Aside from the fintech/broad market contraction over the past 6 months, payments companies should be guaranteed medium term bets. Why? Simple: They have no conscience and would push their own grand…
03/05/2022
How Larger Merchants Might Save Tons of Money by Using Payfacs In our view PCI (payments card industry) is a thinly veiled lobbying arm for the payments industry to ensure that players in the payments ecosystem make more money. They hide behind a guise of secu…
19/04/2022
ReformingRetail’s Payment SOS Series: TSYS, Paysafe Even though our payments SOS series had been dormant for a while (we have day jobs, you know) our most recent article elicited enough of a response to usher in more examples of payment malfeasance.…