This episode of Glenbrook’s Payments on Fire podcast comes from the Shoptalk conference, mid-May 2016. Focused on the entire customer engagement cycle, the attendees are all about influencing consumer behavior, the processes of moving customers through that cycle, about making some portion of enterprise IT work more smoothly, or, yes, even about payments.

Take a listen to my conversations with start-ups Tuku (in-store digital content delivery), Belly (in-store loyalty), Bold Financial Technologies (payout management for Treasury) and established fintech provider ACI Worldwide.

Direct download: Shoptalk_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:41pm EDT

Payments industry professionals naturally have a hard focus on the industry’s own dynamics. So, it’s not uncommon to lose sight of who the customer is and who pays the freight. In retailing, yes, the consumer pays, but payments is a direct cost to the merchant. With all of the changes underway in the U.S. payments landscape, merchants now view payments as a complex, strategic element of their business, both as a way to drive new sales as well as a cost component to be tightly managed.

To learn what’s top of mind for a large scale retailer, take a listen to Dean Sheaffer, SVP of Financial Services at Boscov’s Inc., the U.S.'s largest family-owned department store. In this Payments on Fire podcast, Dean addresses payments as a sales tool (Dean and his team have upped usage of the Boscov private label card to 40% of tender!), payments and data security, and the potential of Faster Money.

Direct download: Boscovs_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:50am EDT

Extension of credit to people in developing markets has been a long time challenge. Banks, of course, look to repayment history to make such determinations but in much of the world, banking relationships and repayment track records are few. But history has demonstrated that extension of credit in developing markets can be effective and profitable. Just look at the Grameen Bank’s high micro-loan repayment rates.

To address this repayment data dearth, Lenddo.com developed a lending data set in multiple developing countries, having gone into the lending business just to generate the data it needed to tune its machine learning capability. Lenddo then built its algorithms that examine some 1,000 characteristics in the data drawn from social, mobile, and other sources. This Payments on Fire podcast with Lenddo.com’s founder Jeff Stewart takes a look at lending in developing countries, social and mobile data sources, and examines the algorithmic "black box" that is at the heart of the company’s approach to making credit decisions in "thin file" markets.

Direct download: Lenddo_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:21pm EDT

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