Payments on Fire® usually focuses on a single topic, typically a fintech company and the business or personal challenges it addresses. In this episode, we take another direction by bringing together three fintech leaders to talk about their company offerings, how they connect up to payments, and some of the obstacles they’ve faced.

George talks with the leadership of three companies working in very different areas: remittances, small business logistics payments, and healthcare.

  • Mike Gaburo, CEO of Brightwell Payments, a company delivering a mobile payments app to global workers for their payroll distribution, enabling card-based purchasing as well as remittance services
  • Robin Gregg, CEO of RoadSync, a business software provider that enables electronic payments to SMBs in the logistics sector; and
  • Alan Nalle Chief Strategy Officer of Patientco, a payments platform with intuitive, mobile-friendly tools for Health Systems to enable patients to pay their healthcare bills.

This conversation illustrates the breadth of payments and the focus required to solve the specific payments needs of each industry segment.

Robin, Mike, and Alan will join Glenbrook partner Beth Horowitz Steel on her panel called Innovative Solutions - Solving Difficult Payment Needs at the Fintech South conference, held April 22 and 23 in Atlanta.

Direct download: EP92_FTS.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:17pm EDT

Five years on from Apple Pay’s release, contactless payment cards are just getting off the ground here in the US but in much of the rest of the card world, contactless payments of both kinds are common practice. In London, half of the card transactions are contactless. The same is true in Canada. While it’s true that the vast majority of these are card-based, not via mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, even the mobile wallets are gaining momentum.

To expand contactless usage, Mobeewave has developed software tools for financial institutions to integrate into their merchant app that turn the merchant’s smartphone into a contactless acceptance device. No added hardware: software only.

We’re talking with Maxime de Nanclas, Mobeewave‘s co-CEO and co-founder. A firm based in Montreal, Mobeewave has worked to turn smartphones into general purpose contactless payment terminals.

This is cool tech and, as Maxime tells it, a great journey for the company. Take a listen as he describes what their software does, how they built it, and their experience navigating the complexities of device certification.

Direct download: EP91_Mobeewave.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:27pm EDT

The UK and the EU take a very different approach to payments industry evolution than here in the States; the former directed by government mandate, the latter by marketplace dynamics and the lighter touch of regulators. But both are responding, at different speeds, to the need of fintechs and enterprises for access to bank-based data and services.

The Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2, written in 2015 and in effect since January of 2018, addresses a range of concerns including a ban on surcharging on card payments and limiting consumer fraud liability exposure from 150 to 50 euros. But its major impact is its enablement of Open Banking through the granting of access to payment rails and payment data managed, up until PSD2, only by banks. Banks are required to open up programmatic access, via APIs, to that data.

In this Payments on Fire® episode, we dive into the UK and EU experience with the PSD2 a year after it going into effect. We take a look at its impact on Open Banking, the opening up of payment rails to these fintechs and other non-bank players.

To do that, Myles Stephenson, CEO of B2B payments firm Modulr, discusses his firm’s experience as an Electronic Money Institution, an organization chartered by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under PSD2 rules. Under its provisions, Modulr gains, or will gain, the ability to initiate payments on behalf of its customers as well as access customer data.

While incumbent financial institutions are hardly thrilled at the prospect of opening up their systems to fintech competitors and the cost of doing so, the operational improvements for customers and increase in competitive activity are expected to generate many benefits.

Direct download: EP90_Modulr.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:11pm EDT

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