Do you know who Frank McNamara is?

Well done if you knew that he invented the credit card!

On this week’s episode of In Control, I was lucky enough to speak to Susan Ehrlich, and to learn all about credit cards.

Susan ran the credit card divisions at Citibank, Washington Mutual, Sears, and Amazon, including building the Amazon Prime 5% cashback card. Now she's a partner at Core Innovation Capital. In other words: she knows how this industry actually works!

I absolutely LOVED this conversation because Susan was able to go so deep. She taught me about the history of the industry, how banks and merchants make money from credit cards, and completely demystified the proposed 10% cap on interest rates.

You do not want to miss this episode!

We covered:

→ The three revenue streams: interchange fees, interest income, and late fees

→ Why credit cards are the most profitable product banks have

→ How Delta makes $7 billion/year from their loyalty program

→ The origins of the first credit card - The Diners Club - in 1950, started by someone who forgot his wallet at lunch

→ What happens to access and rewards if the rate cap goes through

Name. Image. Likeness. How student-athletes are able to receive compensation for endorsements, social media, and appearances.

Or, how student-athletes are paid to play?

On the latest episode of In Control, Richard Scioli of Analog taught me how NIL works, including how creative the compensation can become.

Unlimited BBQ for offensive linesmen? Done.

Decoldest Crawford as the face of… you got it… an air conditioning company? Done.

Richard got into it all to break down the business of college sports. We covered:

→ The three buckets of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) and how they work

→ Why college athletes setting up LLCs is now standard practice

→ How 10 people regulate 363 Division 1 schools and 175,000 athletes

→ The private equity deals reshaping athletic departments

Whenever my mum comes to the US and we go to a restaurant, she never lets her credit card out of her sight - insisting on following the waiter all the way to the register.

They always look baffled, but she might actually be onto something! In-person fraud rates in the US are much higher than in Europe.

Why is card fraud so prevalent?
We share our 16-digit card numbers everywhere - is that safe?
How do merchants actually protect this data?

To dig into all of this, I spoke to Colin Luce, CEO at Basis Theory, and it turns out there's a quiet power struggle happening.

Visa and MasterCard want merchants to rely on their tokens and delete the original card data.

Merchants don't trust what comes next.

Once you give up that data, you can't switch processors, you can't negotiate, you take whatever pricing the networks decide.

We also discussed in the podcast:

- Why agentic commerce isn't really a payments revolution
- Why MasterCard are getting rid of the PAN
- Whether consumers care about card fraud
- How your Stripe token is useless with Adyen