I am a huge fan of Glenbrook Partners, the Menlo Park-based payments consulting firm. I first visited them when I was transitioning from closed to open blogging in 2006. Scott Loftesness and company were enormously helpful back then even though I was potentially elbowing in to their space. It's a kindness you never forget. I look forward to my daily dose of PaymentsNews and the occasional meetup at conferences.

But I'd never had a chance to attend one of their presentations until two days ago at NACHA Payments 2010. What a treat. Partners Erin McCune and Russ Jones drew the dreaded 8 AM Monday slot in a breakout session immediately preceding the Jack Dorsey/Square keynote. So only a 100 or so lucky attendees got to see them knock it out of the park. 

And as much as I enjoyed seeing Square and Wells Fargo's Steve Ellis go at it on the big stage, Russ and Erin would have delivered more value to attendees. They took a nebulous and confusing topic, alt-and-social payments (see inset), and made sense out of it in a 68-slide deck (see table and chart below). Let's all agree to use these terms going forward.

And to top it off, Glenbrook closed the presentation by showing alt-payments in use in the real virtual world at my favorite virtual pet site, Foopets (see previous post and note 1).  

Luckily, you still have a chance to hear an expanded version of this talk via Glenbrook's live webinar next week on social payments (small registration fee required).  

Glenbrook Partners deciphers Web 2.0 payments terms...

...and it's created a social payments classification system

Source: Erin McCune and Russ Jones, Glenbrook Partners presentation at NACHA Payments 2010, April 26, 2010
(reprinted with permission)

Playing Foopets costs money...

...but young gamers hitting the FooBank have more payment options than just their parents' cards
Note: We previously covered Kwedit here

Note:
1. Glenbrook says that virtual pet owners spend about the same on their virtual pets, $25/mo, as real-world pet owners spend on their real-live pets. Amazing! If only Pets.com had thought to sell virtual dog food instead of the real stuff, we might still get to see the sock puppet all over Facebook.