Have you ever wished for a “payments sherpa”? Someone who would share their experiences, opinions, and advice about this industry - the uncut, “real real” of what can happen and what to remember as you move along your payments journey. In this episode, we sit down with one of our favorite payments industry sherpas - Steve Klebe. 

No stranger to our podcasts, this time Steve talks about payments partnerships. This is a topic Steve is passionate about - and for good reasons. Partnerships - the successful ones - make this industry go around. The right partnerships can make the industry better, bring novel and differentiated offerings to the market, and make the payment transaction easier, more secure, and more valuable to consumers and businesses. 

Steve has invested about half his career creating successful strategic partnerships for Verifone, CyberSource, Google, and more (frequently going out on a limb to do it), and he survives to tell his tale. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_234.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:53pm EDT

As humans, our brains like to organize things - classify them, put them in silos. This thinking often works to our advantage - enabling deep analysis and understanding. Sometimes, though, it can work against us. We can be bound to a siloed thought process - a “this or that” false choice that causes us to miss the greater value inherent in doing both.

In searching for guests who will inspire us to eschew false choices in favor of unexpected combinations, we met Glendy Kam, Chief Product Officer at Tassat. In this episode, Yvette enjoyed geeking out on payments innovation with Glendy and digging into how Tassat is creating an infrastructure enabling $1.4Tr in payments for commercial bank customers. 

For all the participants who have been through a Glenbrook workshop and have asked about real-world use cases for distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies in payments, or are trying to figure out how to combine new and existing technologies to solve a problem, this episode is for you. Enjoy!

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_233.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:03pm EDT

In this episode, Glenbrook Partners Yvette Bohanan, Russ Jones, and Chris Uriarte sat down with Julie Fergerson - a long-time payments professional who co-founded the Merchant Risk Council in 2000 and returned a few years ago to take on the role of CEO for what is now an industry-leading, global non-profit. 

We talk with Julie about how the payments industry has changed over the last two decades, with both the professionalization of payments and of fraud, and why she is now spearheading a certification program for the industry. 

True to form, we also had to share our hot takes on topics such as “pay by bank”, and the looming US Credit Card Competition Act. We hope this inspires you to think about your personal career path in payments and your role as a leader in this industry.

Be sure to check out Glenbrook’s preparation course to help you demonstrate your command of payment and fraud knowledge and get ready to take the CPFPP exam.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_232.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:13pm EDT

In this episode, we are exploring one of the “buzziest” buzz words in payments today - orchestration.

If you have been in the payments space for a long time, your reaction to hearing about orchestration might be “What’s all the fuss about? We’ve been evolving these capabilities for decades.” If you are new to the industry, you may think this is some kind of high-performance jet fuel that is painfully needed to improve a rather opaque transaction processing environment.

Joining Yvette Bohanan are two Glenbrook colleagues, Simon Skinner and Samantha Gordon, who have been digging into orchestration solutions. They will be helping us define orchestration, offer a perspective on who should consider orchestration, and for those of you who do, a framework for thinking about orchestration.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_231_Final.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:30pm EDT

Launching a payment product requires big moonshot thinking alongside a lot of agonizing over the details. Understanding the market, the customer journey, and the technology - from every angle requires patience, persistence, and a beginner’s mindset to learn from every success and failure. Thinking about launching a new form of currency, however, is on another level altogether.

There’s an entire population of a country to consider - what does each segment of the population require to be able to use the currency? Then, there is the currency’s role in supporting the economy. How will a new currency be protected from counterfeiting, and what controls will be required to prevent its misuse? How will it work with legacy payment systems and commercial banks? And how will it adhere to laws in place today and be prepared for tomorrow? Last but certainly not least, which technologies will enable all of these things and more?

These were just some of the thoughts bubbling through my mind when I sat down with Jim Cunha, former EVP at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, to discuss the capstone project of his career - Project Hamilton - and the questions he and his team sought to answer as they embarked on their CBDC experiment. I hope you enjoy hearing Jim’s insights on digitizing the world’s reserve currency - I sure did.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_230.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:14pm EDT

It is a rare occurrence when we get to have ALL the Glenbrook partners in one episode of Payments on Fire! 

Glenbrook is kicking off the new year with a (lengthy) conversation on what payments industry trends and developments we think are the most interesting, compelling, and controversial at the moment, and what to watch as we move into 2024.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_229.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:20pm EDT

Debbie Bartoo, the editor of Glenbrook’s daily Payments News, guest hosts this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire alongside colleagues Justin Pituch and Will Eisler.

Listen in as they discuss some of the top payments headlines of the year - fast payments, rising interest rates, BNPL, mobile wallets, identity, CBDCs, and (just a bit of) regulation.

If you want to stay on top of the rapidly evolving payments world with all the headlines delivered each day to your inbox, subscribe to Payments News today.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_228.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:29pm EDT

What if every time you went to pay for something at a store, the clerk behind the counter had a different terminal for each card network - one for Visa, another for American Express, and a few others for local domestic networks? That was what much of the world was like decades ago - and it still is a bit like that in some countries today. But in 1999, collaboration entered the picture when Europay, Visa, and Mastercard came together to create a common specification for Chip and PIN so that any chip-enabled card could be read from any chip reader anywhere in the world if both complied with a common EMV specification. That significantly impacted Chip and PIN adoption - for merchants and consumers.

Today, EMVCo supports seven EMV technologies. As a consumer, when you insert your card into a reader, “tap to pay,” or pay using Secure Remote Commerce, or as a merchant, accept payment through a mobile device or a QR code, support a tokenized card credential, or 3D Secure technology, you are benefiting from the work of EMVCo.

In this episode, we talk with Oliver Manahan to understand how EMVCo fulfills its mission, catch up on its 2023 initiatives, and try to peek over the horizon to see what might be in store next for EMVCo.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_227_EMVCo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:11pm EDT

Debit routing - once again, all the rage.

On July 1, 2023, the US Federal Reserve’s clarification on Reg II went into effect. The clarification confirms that Reg II - which required unaffiliated debit network routing as part of the Durbin Amendment - also applies to CNP environments. 

What were we thinking in 2015 when debit routing at POS, contactless payments, and chip and PIN were “of the moment”? What lessons can we glean from a conversation then that apply now? We’ve pulled Episode 16 from our vault to find out.

We hope you enjoy this far-reaching discussion that moves from some EMV fundamentals to the implications of having a long tale of adoption, how consumer behavior and payment capabilities have to evolve in concert, and the reaction of fraudsters when things change in large, complex environments like the card system. 

And stay tuned for our next episode where we welcome EMVCo to the show to see what they are up to these days and take a peak over the horizon. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_226.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:23pm EDT

Glenbrook's Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Drew Edmond are back from a few days of learning, networking, and speaking (including a live broadcast from the Money Pot) at this year's Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas.

Chris and Drew talk with Yvette Bohanan about the noteworthy payments trends they observed at the show and what related themes our team is paying attention to.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_225.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:23pm EDT

Creating a great purchase experience may start with a frictionless checkout process, but it doesn’t end there. In fact, it takes a lot of effort to create a well-functioning payment platform and a cross-functional operations environment to keep a business running smoothly and customers happy. Like most things in life, it’s easier to talk about doing this than to do it. So it helps to learn from someone else’s experience about what has worked or hasn’t worked for them.

In this episode, we go big - talking with two Google leaders, Luda Sokolov and Aarti Bharathan, who have been on a relentless mission to make the work of the Google teams supporting payments for billions of people worldwide more efficient, stable, and scalable.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_224.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:42pm EDT

“So, have fees gone up?” 

Yvette Bohanan starts with the tough question in this Fanning the Flames episode. 

In our August Payments Post, Chris Uriarte and Justin Pituch observed an underlying theme of broad downward pressure on the cost of merchant processing as well as fee backlash directed towards card networks. 

Tune in to hear our thoughts on these fees and the impact on stakeholders across the industry. 

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_223.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:10pm EDT

We get the opportunity to work with many different types of merchants in our Merchant Practice at Glenbrook: Global omnichannel retailers, marketplaces, commerce platforms, utilities, you name it. One of the major categories that we work with is subscription merchants, and they come with their own unique needs and perspectives. 

Subscription merchants and merchants that have recurring payments as part of their business model rely on the ability to charge their customers on an ongoing basis. In this Fanning the Flames episode, Drew Edmond joins Yvette Bohanan to dive deep into an issue that has grown in importance with the continued growth of the subscription economy: involuntary churn. 

Listen in to hear Drew shed light on this tricky and important topic for subscription merchants.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_222.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:03pm EDT

Last week, we hosted the first Payments on Fire Live Stream event on the future of fast payments in the U.S.

This episode highlights the panel conversation with Bernadette Ksepka, Federal Reserve Financial Services, Elena Whisler, The Clearing House, and Bryan Derman, Glenbrook Partners. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_221_Enhanced.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:13pm EDT

Policy abuse, a form of first-party fraud, occurs when a customer - whether legitimate or a professional posing as a legitimate customer - manipulates a business’s policies for financial gain. 

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Chris Uriarte sit down with Eyal Elazar, Head of Product Marketing at Riskified, to discuss policy abuse trends and the implications of consumers and professional criminals increasingly engaging in these schemes.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_220.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:48pm EDT

Government leaders, policymakers, and a host of incumbent and new providers are focusing on cross-border payments. Innovating to increase transparency, lower cost, and make funds available in near real-time is showing up on agendas and roadmaps across the globe.

Money and resources are being thrown at this problem from every possible angle. Yet friction points persist. Money does not get to beneficiaries with equal speed. Costs remain high and hidden. Compliance screening and due diligence create delays.

Ryan Zagone, Head of Americas for Wise for Banks, and Glenbrook’s Joanna Wisniecka join Yvette on this episode of Payments on Fire to raise a fundamental question: Is technology the whole answer? And if it isn’t, what is?

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_219_-_Enhanced.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:34pm EDT

Globally, cross-border payments represent $156 trillion annually - roughly 25% of global GDP - and are projected to reach nearly $250 trillion by 2027. From a payments industry perspective, these transactions account for approximately $40 billion of $2.1 trillion in fee-generated revenues, excluding foreign exchange (2022 McKinsey Global Payments Report). These attention-grabbing numbers have been in the line of sight of regulators, innovators, and incumbents with increasing urgency. Improvements in domestic systems have matured in many countries, leading to conversations on how new fast payments systems can go cross-border. And, indeed, they are in several regions. Central Bank Digital Currencies are piloting cross-border payments, too. 

In this episode, we’re looking at the rapidly evolving space of cross-border payments with Glenbrook colleagues who have been traveling the globe working extensively with regulators, corporations, and governments on cross-border initiatives.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_218.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:28pm EDT

The payment provider space is a complex and crowded field in the payments universe, particularly when it comes to supporting merchants. Independent Sales Organizations, Payment Facilitators, and Commerce Enablers all work to simplify payment acceptance for merchants, yet they each craft specific go-to-market strategies and differentiated value propositions. The diversity of these stakeholders underscores the diversity of merchants' payment acceptance requirements.

In this episode, we had the opportunity to talk with Jared Isaacman, Founder and CEO of the Integrated Payments Provider, Shift4. Over the past 24 years, Shift4 has evolved by addressing the unique requirements of merchant categories and sub-categories in the increasingly complex Point of Sale (POS) environment. Jared’s insights on how he bootstrapped the company to an IPO, successfully integrated multiple acquisitions, and often takes a problem-solving approach that highlights a different ethos than his peers makes this conversation soar.

 

Direct download: Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_217_v3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:18pm EDT

Each month, Justin Pituch recaps the news that got Glenbrook talking in his Payments Post. In a "double feature" for June and July, Justin covered two major themes: 1) organizations responding to greenfield opportunity in fast payments and 2) organizations recalibrating their post-COVID fintech bets.

In this Fanning the Flames episode, Justin and Yvette Bohanan discuss these developments, as well as Justin's recent Payments Views posts on the pain of B2B and how ISO 20022 could help solve B2B data challenges. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_216.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:47pm EDT

We find ourselves pondering many questions since the FedNow® launch, the third fast payments network introduced in the US.

To gain perspective on the questions that have been asked and answered, and those that remain, we’re giving a second listen to Episode 10 - when George Peabody sat down with Carol Coye Benson to discuss The Clearing House’s announced plans for a multi-year effort that resulted in their fast payments network, RTP®. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_215.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:09pm EDT

Issuer tokens, network tokens, EMV tokens - whatever you call them - continue to be a hot topic for merchants, payment service providers, issuing banks, processors, and the networks themselves. This “sleight of hand” substitution of a payment account number with an indistinguishable alternative carries with it a robust set of capabilities that have promised to reduce the value of breached payment account information, lower the cost of card replacement, and enable unique account numbers for the expanding universe of payment-enabled devices.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte and Russ Jones discuss how tokens are implemented in the “card present” and “card not present” environments and how EMV tokens are becoming normalized in interchange tables, scheme fees, and provider services. As tokens move squarely into mainstream card processing, this conversation highlights important distinctions in network and provider implementations, fees, and regulations that should be on everyone’s radar.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_214.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:42pm EDT

Payments on Fire Episode 21, originally aired: June 15, 2015

Network tokenization - the promised land of payments. Like most promised lands, the journey there is epic and, well, hard.

One question we hear from our clients, workshop participants, and the folks in our Merchant Round Table is: Are we there yet?

We dug into our vault to understand the journey - where we started and how far we’ve come. We found Episode 21, when George Peabody and Russ Jones discussed network tokenization (aka issuer tokenization, aka EMV tokenization).

This conversation is an excellent episode to get the history, essential workings, and context for an important, if not long in the tooth, technology reshaping how payment credentials are propagated and managed in our digital era.

Yvette will be catching up with Russ and Chris Uriarte to discuss recent developments in network tokenization on an upcoming podcast - and try to decide when we’ll arrive at our destination.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_213.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:17pm EDT

While payment facilitation has opened up a new segment of service providers within the payments industry, embedded finance is opening up the world of payments to every company.

The allure of embedded finance is rooted in the deepening of the customer relationship through offering meaningful financial products. This deeper relationship comes in the form of increased customer loyalty - or “stickiness” - and new revenue streams accretive to the company’s core business.

This is all well and good, but payments and financial products are regulated, complex, and often require support at the critical moment of the transaction or afterward. How is customer support evolving to meet the needs of companies and customers in the world of embedded finance? How should providers be thinking about customer support? 

In this episode, Yvette sits down with Ashley Isenberg, VP of Revenue and Strategic Partnerships at Finix and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond to explore the ongoing evolution of customer support in the payments industry.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_212.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:52pm EDT

With all its associated technologies (neural networks, symbolic reasoning, search algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, expert systems, and more), AI has been evolving in universities, the government, and corporations for decades. But only those with a keen interest in this technology have been paying close attention to its progress. Meanwhile, a chatbot helped you when you contacted support. Or you used Alexa or Siri to answer a question, play some music, turn on your lights, buy something online, pay your bills, or tell a joke. In our lives, we have caught glimpses of AI’s potential but no clear line of sight as to how powerful the underpinning technologies have become or how quickly they are evolving.

With the unveiling of ChatGPT and similar tools, we are now face to face with the AI era. In his book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman says, "Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability to do these things, and with greater breadth and scope. Within a few years, this copilot will fall somewhere between useful and essential to most professionals and many other sorts of workers. Without GPT-4, they’ll be slower, less comprehensive, and working at a great disadvantage.

The Payments Industry is interesting because it is constantly changing, and technology has always been a significant change agent. For decades, networks, processors, PSPs, merchants, and financial institutions have invested in technology to increase adoption, create new services, manage risk, and accelerate initiation, clearing, and settlement. 

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Frank Young, a 35-year veteran of the fintech space, and Glenbrook’s Russ Jones to think about how AI might transform the payments industry and how organizations should mobilize for this transformation. It’s time to start talking about this topic seriously - with each other - and not just asking ChatGPT. 

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_211.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:09pm EDT

Payments on Fire Episode 1, originally aired: September 7, 2014

Innovation in the payments industry is a funny thing. Sometimes payments lead. Sometimes technology leads. Increasingly around the world, regulators lead.

In preparing for an upcoming podcast on AI, Yvette thought about Glenbrook’s first Payments on Fire podcast episode - in 2014 - on Bitcoin. So we’re pulling it from the vault to share.  

If you have ever wanted to be a fly on the wall while industry thought leaders contemplated the implications of something new, here’s your chance. This is eavesdropping at its best - and a great reminder that innovation and disruption are not just about technical feasibility.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_210.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:52pm EDT

In Part 2, Yvette Bohanan continues the conversation from Episode 206 with the commercial practice team at Glenbrook. We cover some new topic areas, including banks, risk and fraudsters, and the investment community in this macroeconomic environment. Listen in to see what we're watching, where we might see some blind spots, or where the next set of curveballs will be coming as we get into the back half of 2023. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_209.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:12pm EDT

Russ Jones chats with Yvette Bohanan about Glenbrook's new Payments Boot Camp Intensive workshop. Listen in to hear more details including agenda highlights, workshop format, and who should attend.

Register for any session before July 10 to automatically receive a 10% discount!

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_208.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:16pm EDT

Each month, Justin Pituch recaps the news that got Glenbrook talking in his Payments Post. In May, he observed a burst of news highlighting new technology reshaping how American consumers make purchases and verify their identity. At the same time, other articles underscored how American consumers are struggling to fulfill financial obligations against the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty.

In this Fanning the Flames episode, Justin and Yvette Bohanan consider these forces and potential implications for the future of payments.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_Fanning_the_Flames_-_Episode_207.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:31pm EDT

Some people know Glenbrook for our Payments Boot Camp workshops, some know us for our book - Payment Systems in the US - while others know us for this podcast. Interestingly, while we do all of those things, we are, in fact, a consulting firm. A consulting firm that believes educating industry professionals is a great way to make the industry stronger.

Our consulting practice gives us a front-row seat to stakeholders across the value chain. Whether they are in start-ups or central banks, we hear what’s on their minds every day and have the opportunity to help them tackle challenges, identify growth opportunities, and instigate change.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan sits down with Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Drew Edmond to take stock of payment industry trends as we reach the halfway point of 2023, to hear their perspectives on what’s hot, what’s not, and what are they watching as we venture into the second half of the year.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_206.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:37pm EDT

In payments, as it is in life, a simple question is often wrapped in complexity. The complexity of the payments acceptance landscape, with an increasing number of stakeholders and technology providers, changing regulations and rules, and Issuers implementing new authentication and authorization mechanisms - any one or a combination of these could lead to major and minor impacts to the operational and financial performance of a business.

And while this has been the case for several decades, we find ourselves in a macroeconomic environment that requires us to find operational efficiencies, which places the payments team under increasing pressure to maximize the number of successful payments, lower the cost of accepting payments, and support customer acquisition to drive incremental revenue.

Long story short, these “simple questions” are being asked more often and at higher organizational levels. Why are simple questions hard to answer? Yvette Bohanan talks with Klas Bäck, Founder and CEO of Pagos Solutions, and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_205.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:27pm EDT

In the US, fast payments discussions have centered around person-to-person, business-to-business, bill payment, and digital wallet funding in/out scenarios. In 2022, RTP® processed $72B, the majority of this volume communing from PayPal and Venmo funding activity. Zelle has reached a highly respectable $629B in person-to-person payments, traversing into “person-to-sole proprietor” territory. ACH, the workhorse of bulk payments is, as we say “hotter than ever” with Same Day ACH seeing an 86% year-over-year increase growing from $943B to $1.758B annual volume. But what about consumer-to-business purchases? Is there an opportunity for the US to see momentum in open banking and fast payments move into the commerce domain as they are in India, Brazil, and other countries? What will it take - and are we ready - to “pay by bank”?

Yvette Bohanan welcomes Eric Shoykhet, CEO & Co-Founder of Link Financial Technologies, to this episode to share his thoughts on the topic.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_204.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:50pm EDT

A 2022 report from the CFPB titled Buy Now, Pay Later: Market trends and consumer impacts noted that from 2019 to 2021, the dollar volume of BNPL originations through five lenders surveyed grew by 1,092 percent, from $2 billion to $24.2 billion. BNPL adoption continues, not just in the US but globally, making it one of the most watched payment methods in the world. 

BNPL’s rapid ascent has raised questions about its use: Who is choosing to use BNPL? Is it helpful or harmful to consumers’ credit and overall financial well-being? Does it improve financial inclusion? Is it displacing other forms of payment at checkout? A quick online search leads to mixed data points and inconsistent findings, often based on modest sample sizes and extrapolations.

To answer these questions, we sat down with Kristin Carlson, Global Products and Analytics Data Scientist, and Zach Tondre, Director of Credit Risk Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who conducted a longitudinal study to obtain insight into these and other questions.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_203_EDITED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:49pm EDT

In this episode, we explore the intersection of three significant payment trends: helping small businesses modernize their payment acceptance options, embedded finance, and the consumer lending phenomenon known as  Buy Now, Pay Later. We look at the potential market - asking ourselves if there is demand from small businesses and consumers. Then we unpack the opportunity using our BNPL “flywheel” to examine the critical success factors for any BNPL solution.

Yvette Bohanan and Debbie Bartoo are joined by Bobby Tzekin, Founder and CEO of Wisetack (and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp alumnus) to examine how technology, consumer and small business demand, and banking are opening up a very large market in the BNPL space - one that has a lot of potential and a lot of nuance.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_202.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:23pm EDT

In this episode, we are taking a closer look at the relationship underpinning much fintech innovation in payments – the fintech, bank, and BaaS trilogy. These 3-way partnerships have spurred innovation, increased access to financial services, and created offerings that appeal to a broad range of businesses and consumers. But in the context of these 3-way partnerships, new and existing risks abound, and relationships between counterparties are not well-established – making this a perfect haven for bad actors.

Join us as we explore the current state of payments risk management across these alliances, and discuss the opportunities to make this new landscape safe, strong, and sustainable.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_201.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:23pm EDT

There are a lot of headlines in the payments world. Payments News is Glenbrook’s curated news feed of the headlines that matter most every day, but we’ll readily acknowledge that it can be a lot to digest. That’s why we’ve introduced Payments Post, a month-end roundup of the news items that got us talking as a team along with some commentary about why we think they’re particularly important to the direction of the industry.

Glenbrook’s Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode to discuss the implications of the top April headlines, which were all related to account-to-account (A2A) payments. 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_200.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:55pm EDT

Cloud-based platforms, machine learning that increasingly improves or eliminates routine tasks, the phenomenon of “everything” as a service - platforms that stand on their own and tech stacks that embed complex capabilities into other software with minimal coding - these are just some of the technologies reshaping what is commonly referred to as “back office” financial operations.

At the same time, these technologies are reshaping the customer journey - particularly when it comes to payments. New payment experiences facilitated by digital wallets, digital currencies, fast payment systems, and sophisticated transaction monitoring tools are increasing sales, lowering costs, enabling global expansion, unlocking new revenue streams, and speeding up settlement cycles.

However, as we know, a critical component for maximizing any technology investment is the leadership of an organization. In this case, the relationship between the payments leader and the Chief Financial Officer is front and center.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Vivek Sharma, Head of Revenue and Financial Management at Stripe, to consider the importance of this relationship and how, by joining forces, these leaders can help the C-Suite achieve the organization’s broader strategic objectives.

 

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire---Episode-199---MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:32am EDT

Wrapping up our three part series exploring Brazil’s Pix, Carlos Brandt, Head of Management and Operations for Pix at the Central Bank of Brazil, sits down with Yvette Bohanan and Elizabeth McQuerry to discuss some of the keys to Pix success and what the future looks like as Pix continues to transform Brazil’s payments landscape.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_198.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:56am EDT

In the second installment of our series on Pix, Carlos Netto, CEO and Co-Founder of Matera and Sarah Hoisington, Vice-President of Strategy and Marketing discuss what makes Pix “tick", and the challenges and opportunities presented to the banks responsible to implement this new payment system.

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_197.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:03pm EDT

There are a lot of headlines in the payments world. PaymentsNews is Glenbrook’s curated news feed of the headlines that matter most every day, but we’ll readily acknowledge that it can be a lot to digest. That’s why we’ve introduced PaymentsPost, a month-end roundup of the news items that got us talking as a team along with some commentary about why we think they’re particularly important to the direction of the industry. 

Glenbrook’s Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode to discuss the implications of the top March headlines, including stumbling blocks for fintechs and their sponsor banks, a bank-led battle for the checkout page, and a clearer view of the path forward for U.S. fast payments. 

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_196.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:25pm EDT

Call them what you will - Instant Payment Systems, Fast Payment Systems, Real Time Payments - or by their brands UPI, RTP® and more - these payment systems are experiencing success around the world.

As the US stands weeks away from launching FedNow, we decided to take a closer look at the success of one of the hottest newcomers to the instant payments scene - Brazil’s Pix.

As it turns out, there is much to be learned from success.

Launched in November 2020, in just 2 years Pix had processed R$13 Trillion. Remarkable as that statistic is, it is more impressive when you realize that within 7 months of its launch, Pix was processing more volume than credit documents (DOC), electronic transfers (TED), and bank slips combined. By February of 2022, Pix had overtaken debit and credit card transaction volumes. By December of 2022 Pix broke a record - processing more than 100 million transactions in 24 hours.

If that is not enough, it looks to be accomplishing what many countries hope for with a new fast payment system - Pix has moved the needle on the financially underserved, shifting from 50% of the population being unbanked to 75% of the population using Pix.

In this first episode of a 3-part series, Yvette Bohanan sits down with Cici Northup, Joanna Wisniecka, and Elizabeth McQuerry to discuss the “state of play” for fast payment systems and the key questions to ask about what the future holds for all of us as the world enters a phase of transformative modernization.

 

Direct download: Glenbrook_Payments_on_Fire_-_Episode_195.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:51pm EDT

In this latest episode of Fanning the Flames, Yvette Bohanan catches up with Joanna Wisniecka and Cici Northup after their recent attendance at the 2023 Payments Summit and the Fintech: Innovation, Inclusion, and Risks Conference. Listen in to hear why “FOMO is not the answer” when implementing fast payments (or anything, really), and their other key takeaways on the digital currencies and fraud topics. 

Joanna is currently on the road again at the Women in Payments USA Symposium, moderating a panel on fast cross-border payments. If you are there, be sure to connect with her! 

 


What do Fintechs have to do with the cereal aisle? Tune in to this episode of Payments on Fire: Fanning the Flames to hear the answer to that question and more, as Glenbrook’s Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond prepare for MRC Vegas 23. 

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire---Episode-193-MIXED_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:10pm EDT

Nacha's Phixius is one of the better kept secrets in the U.S. payments landscape. Maybe that needs to change. Take a listen to Yvette Bohanan and George Peabody as they speak with George Throckmorton, Senior Director at Nacha and the head of Nacha’s Phixius data network initiative.

Direct download: 192---George-Throckmorton-Nacha---Phixius-MIXED-vsn2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:08pm EDT

We’ve reached our final destination on Glenbrook’s 2022 tour of local payment methods around the world. Joanna Wisniecka joins Yvette Bohanan on this episode of Fanning the Flames to chat about her recent trip to Jordan. Joanna walks us through her experience opening and making payments with a Zain Cash account, and also provides insights into JoPACC (Jordan Payments & Clearing Company) initiatives throughout the country. 

Direct download: Episode-191---Fanning-the-Flames-A-Year-in-Travel---Jordan-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:16pm EDT

With many of us still experiencing cold and rainy winter weather, let’s look to warmer climates as Glenbrook’s Chris Uriarte walks us through his payments journey in French Polynesia. 

If you’ve attended a Payments Boot Camp, you’ve heard us say that payment systems are domestic by nature. The experience Chris has in the islands of French Polynesia really brings that point home. Listen in to hear his observations and key takeaways on local payment methods. 

 


The next destination on our journey around the world is Singapore! Glenbrook’s Chris Uriarte and Bethany May come on the show to share their stories using local and regional payment methods. Listen in to hear their experiences using GrabPay, QR codes, and even digital currency to pay a friend back for dinner. 

While at the Singapore FinTech Festival, Bethany also had the opportunity to participate in a Central Bank Digital Currency pilot put on by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. She provides her insights on the “purpose bound money” trial and overall observations on the research and experimentation being done on CBDCs in Singapore. 

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire---Episode-189-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:37pm EDT

Next up in Glenbrook’s travelogue series, Nikhat Choudhury joins Yvette Bohanan to share her experience making payments on a recent trip to Turkey. 

In this double feature episode, Elizabeth McQuerry and Bethany May also provide observations on the local payments scene in Ethiopia, including their use of the e-money wallet Telebirr. 

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire---Episode-188-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:38pm EDT

In 2022, travel started to get back to “normal” and the Glenbrook team had many opportunities to get out and about. No trip would be complete without running a few payments experiments. Over the next 5 Fanning the Flames episodes, we’ll take you with us on our journeys to hear first hand experiences and observations with local payment networks across the globe. 

To kick the series off, Elizabeth McQuerry joins Yvette Bohanan to discuss a recent trip to Brazil. 

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire-Episode-187-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:02pm EDT

We’ve talked a lot recently about how important it is to stay up to speed on regulations. In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George Peabody and Chris Uriarte are joined by Michael Borgia, Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, to discuss data security and privacy and the steps regulators are taking in this space.

Direct download: Episode-186---Michael-Borgia-Davis-Wright-Tremaine-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:09pm EDT

Glenbrook has been providing payments education for over 15 years. In that time, over 35,000 payments professionals have attended Glenbrook workshops, including the popular Payments Boot Camp. The Payments Boot Camp provides a thorough overview of the global payments industry - an industry that is constantly changing. As you can imagine, the material for our workshops changes with it. 

Glenbrook’s Russ Jones joins Yvette Bohanan to discuss the refreshed Payments Boot Camp agenda as well as the newly designed Advanced Payments workshop. Listen in for a behind-the-scenes look at how Glenbrook’s education content is curated and why certain topics may not be included at all. 

If you are interested in attending a Glenbrook workshop, click here for upcoming opportunities to learn and network with your peers. 

Direct download: Episode-185-Fanning-the-Flames---Glenbrook-Education-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:32pm EDT

We talk about ACH a lot at Glenbrook (even coining the phrase “ACH is Hot”) and there’s a reason for that. More than 29 billion ACH Network payments were made in 2021, valued at close to $73 trillion. While ACH technology has been around for decades, modernization has made this system virtually unrecognizable from what existed in the 1970’s, and it continues to evolve. 

In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan are joined by Michael Herd, Senior Vice President of ACH Network Administration at Nacha. In the conversation, Mike walks us through the state of ACH, insights on volume and growth, and new Nacha operating rules.

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Episode-TBD---Michael-Herd-Nacha-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:44pm EDT

Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, Cici Northup, and Joanna Wisniecka are back from Money20/20 and return to Payments on Fire to debrief with Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode. If you listened to Episode 180, you know what hot topics the team was anticipating at the conference. Was it everything they expected? Tune in to hear the highlights and observations. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Episode-183--Fanning-the-Flames-Money20-20-Recap-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:22pm EDT

Becoming a fintech is no easy task. There’s the foundational idea, there’s the team, the market opportunity, macroeconomic conditions, and the necessary skills of running a business. Never easy and today it’s even tougher for new fintechs given rising interest rates, consumer hesitation, and the uncertain global economy. 

There’s also the make-or-break concern of regulatory compliance. 

In this Payments on Fire® episode, Cameron Peake, partner at VC firm Restive Ventures (recently renamed from Financial Venture Studio) joins Glenbrook’s Yvette Bohanan and George Peabody in a discussion on the regulatory and contractual issues fintechs face. 

Cameron’s firm takes a hands-on approach in helping their fintech investments navigate those complexities. And in these conditions, a guiding hand has to be a welcome value-add for a fintech looking for a VC partner. Smart money is always better than the clueless variety.

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire--182-with-Cameron-Peake-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:56am EDT

Join Wordline's Michael Steinbach and Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody to hear the story of SEPA’s creation, the Single Euro Payments Area. You’ll also learn about Worldline, Europe’s largest processor.

It's an amazing story. If you are concerned with how networks work, or thinking of building network-based processes, there are lessons here - and cautions. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Episode-178---Worldline-Michael-Steinbach-MIXED-vsn2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:11pm EDT

Yvette Bohanan hosts Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, Cici Northup, and Joanna Wisniecka to discuss their attendance at the upcoming Money20/20 conference. Listen in to hear what noteworthy payments trends the team is paying attention to and what related themes they expect to surface at Money20/20. We’ll catch up with them after the conference to see what takeaways were most surprising or interesting. 

If you are attending Money20/20, we’d love to connect! Please reach out to Bryan, Chris, Cici, or Joanna on Our Team page or connect directly on LinkedIn. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Episode-180-Fanning-the-Flames---Money-20-20-Pre-Conversation-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:51pm EDT

Most of us see payments innovation as the force that moves markets. That’s true when it comes to user experience and the tech that moves money. But it is government regulation and business contract rules that guide and control what financial services players can, and can’t, do with their shiny new tools. Or crusty old ones.

Regulation in the US is a complex, multi-layered reality for incumbents and fintechs alike. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Jennifer Aguilar, Sr. Associate at law firm Alston & Bird, provides a crisp review of payment system rules, federal and state regulations, Regs E and Z, and more.

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Payments-on-Fire--179-Talking-Payments-Rules-and-Reg-MIXED.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:26pm EDT

Glenbrook’s Russ Jones returns with George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan on this episode of Payments on Fire® to discuss tokenization - a substitution of a high value primary account number with a digit that, in many cases, looks just like the original PAN, but isn't.

Tune in as they break down how tokenization works and the security it provides, amidst numerous cooking metaphors. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Tokenization_-_Russ_Jones.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:41pm EDT

Merchants rejoice? Credit card interchange regulation is on the table with the Credit Card Competition Act of 2022. But the new rule proposed by Senators Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall is pretty unusual, and the researchers at Glenbrook have been hard at work trying to figure out what it means for the industry. How is it different from existing debit interchange regulation and credit interchange regulation in other jurisdictions? And how will players across the value chain react if the rule takes effect? Will anything really change? Glenbrook’s Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan to discuss potential implications.

https://pof.glenbrook.com/


Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond joins Yvette Bohanan on the show to recap his experience at the PaymentsEd Forum in Washington DC earlier this month. In addition to attending the conference, Drew also spoke on a panel about “How collaboration at scale can improve outcomes” with Jordan Kaplan from Groupon and Jonathan Lee from Netflix, moderated by Tyler Heun from checkout.com. 

Tune in to hear more about Drew’s panel discussion as well as the major topics of conversation around the conference “water cooler”. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Episode-176-Fanning-the-Flames---PaymentsEd-Forum-2022-MIXED-vsn2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:49pm EDT

If you’ve attended a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp®, chances are good that you remember reviewing push and pull payments during the key concepts. The determination for whether a transaction is push or pull comes down to who is sharing their payment address. If the receiver is sharing, it is a push payment. If the sender is sharing, it is a pull payment. But what if the sender and receiver are not personally involved in initiating the transaction? 

Russ Jones joins George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan on this episode of Payments on Fire® to talk about delegated push payments, where another party has permission to initiate a push transaction on the sender’s behalf. Listen in as they discuss the nuances around delegated push payments and the use cases for these transactions. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Delegated_Push_Payments_-_Russ_Jones.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:16am EDT

Glenbrook’s Neel Saunshi and Yvette Bohanan return to explain the Proof of Work consensus
algorithm. Listen in as they discuss what it is, how it works, and the environmental impact from
the associated energy consumption.

https://pof.glenbrook.com/

Direct download: Fanning_The_Flames_-_Proof_Of_Work.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:59pm EDT

Glenbrook’s own Elizabeth McQuerry and Joanna Wisniecka just returned from spending a couple of weeks in Kenya leading training on inclusive payments systems. 

While in the country, they got to play end-users of digital payments and experimented with M-PESA’s mobile money e-wallet. You may have been following their payments adventure on Glenbrook’s LinkedIn page

Listen in to hear more about their experiences, some quick insights into other learnings from Kenya, and what fast payments developments they are seeing on the continent. 

https://pof.glenbrook.com/ 


Chuck Huang, Founder and CEO of Citcon, joins George Pebody and Yvette Bohanan on this episode of Payments on Fire® to chat about digital wallets across the globe. Listen in to hear their thoughts on where the industry is headed as the consumer payment choice continues to diversify.

Direct download: POF_EP_171.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:27pm EDT

In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George and Yvette Bohanan welcome Ahon Sarkar, GM of Helix by Q2. Listen in as they discuss embedded finance, multi-tenancy, participating in the FedNow pilot, and bringing online, physical and financial worlds together into a consistent experience that is meaningful to customers.


Just off the plane from Nashville, Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and Cici Northup sat down with Yvette Bohanan to chat about attending NACHA’s Smarter Faster Payments Conference, where Elizabeth also participated in a session with the US Faster Payments Council. Tune in to hear their takeaways and why this year was “not your grandma’s NACHA conference”.


2022 just started and we got so much to see and learn this year. But, we are not alone in this learning journey. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are here to stay, so we also should learn why and how it works for the payments industry. 

 

Starting this season of Payments on Fire®, we will have Ismini Psychoula discussing fundamental technology, AI and ML, and its role in financial services. Ismini is a Research Scientist at OneSpan. OneSpan is a global organization that is focused on digital banking security and e-signatures, delivering trust and business productivity solutions for more than 10,000 customers in 100 countries. In the financial industry, more than half of the top 100 global banks rely on OneSpan solutions to protect their online, mobile and ATM channels. 

 

Ismini Psychoula got a PhD in Computer Science with a thesis about Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for Smart Healthcare. At OneSpan she’s Researching and designing privacy preserving and explainable machine learning models for financial systems.

 

In this episode, you’ll hear about Ethical AI, AI feeding and monitoring, Machine Learning bias and how it all affects the financial system. We’ll take a deep dive in the research to prevent fraud and increase transaction security.

 

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Podcast transcript

The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog


The new year is coming with lots of innovations for the payment industry. Some of them will impact some companies and/or all the industry, changing how things work on the marketplace. George welcomes back Russ Jones to Payment on Fire and they will uncover the lens of the game-changing innovations, including talking about the upcoming events and changes that really matter to the arc of the payment industry. Glen is a Payments Consultant, Analyst, Co-Author of "Payments Systems in the U.S.” and partner at Glenbrook Partners.

In this episode, Russ will discuss the Webinar presented by him and Yvette Bohanan between December 15th and 16th about innovation and payments, with topics like types of payment systems and technologies, how the different use cases lay out what's unique about each, variations and differences around the world and how the payments industry is structured.

You’ll also hear about core system modernization, systems running 24/7/365, strong customer payment authentications and several other topics. Let’s hear George Peabody and Russ Jones talk about what to expect for the payments industry in 2022.



Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog

The Glenbrook Education schedule

Direct download: Ep_160_-_RJ_on_Innovation_in_Payments_Workshop.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:34pm EDT

If you’re an e-commerce merchant selling across border, you’ve got to answer a few questions:

  1. What methods of payment should you support in each country you sell in? Not every country is as infatuated with cards as is the U.S.
  2. And even if customers in those countries are using cards, how do you optimize your authorization rate? If you’re not sophisticated about this, your decline rate could exceed 40%, a huge hit. It turns out routing transactions via local acquiring banks is one answer. But how do you do that?
  3. Subscription services store card numbers or a tokenized version to initiate periodic payment transactions. They never want to have a card declined because they, honestly, don’t want to have to contact customers to request they update their card account info because some portion of those customers are going to decide to cancel little used subscriptions. How does a merchant mitigate those lost payments?

Serving the e-commerce needs of merchants operating across borders is a primary focus of payments service provider BlueSnap. In this conversation with BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier and Payments on Fire® host George Peabody, you’ll hear how multiple discrete steps combine to keep AUTH rates high and costs in line.

You’ll also hear from Ralph, a respected payments industry veteran, his views on fintechs and the opportunities available to new players in payments.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

Direct download: EP159_BlueSnap.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:20pm EDT

Payment scams and the fraudsters who perpetrate them are everywhere. And as we speed up payments, the ability to send money from one account to another in near real-time, there’s a lot to like for users. And for fraudsters.

Scammers love it when they convince us to send them money from our own accounts. This is called authorized push payment fraud and it is a growing problem.

To shed light on APP fraud, its impact, and some approaches to detecting fraudster coercion and the misdirected payments it causes, join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and PJ Rohall, Fraud Subject Matter Expert at Featurespace, a fraud management software company. PJ is also the co-founder of About Fraud.Com, a community site for the fraud management industry.

In this episode George and PJ discuss the growth of APP fraud, the range of scam types, and a few techniques to detect and deter it. You’ll hear him describe examples of the impact APP fraud has caused on individuals, many least able to weather this kind of financial damage. Psychological damage is real.

Then come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Links to UK Finance reports and Take Five for Fraud resources
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP158_APPfraud.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:08pm EDT

Financial health and inclusion in the US remain as major concerns  and challenges for the nation, the millions who struggle with access to affordable financial services, and payments experts focused in this arena.

Join Glenbrook's Erin McCune and Justin Pituch as they speak with a recent panel of expert practitioners in the financial health space: Kimberley Gartner, Arjan Schutte, and Ryan Falvey. 

Kimberley is Chief Growth Officer at Canary, a company that helps businesses establish emergency relief funds for their employees. Arjan and Ryan both work in the venture capital space; Arjan leads Core Innovation Capital and Ryan heads up Financial Venture Studio.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

Direct download: EP158_FIPanel.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00pm EDT

This podcast with Mimi Joy explores consumer financial wellbeing in the US and initiatives to improve access to quality financial services for low and moderate income Americans. Mimi shares her perspective as Head of Partnerships at the Financial Health Network, a leading authority in the space.

Topics discussed include:

  • The current state of the financial health landscape
  • Research on the effect of the pandemic on low and moderate income consumers and their financial wellbeing
  • New approaches to serving the needs of vulnerable consumers
  • Key financial health lessons for payments professionals

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP156_FHN.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:37pm EDT

Multiplayer fintech takes payments services to levels of depth and breadth not seen before. The breadth of payments platform services enables other fintechs to bring comprehensive capabilities to their customers.

Listen to this conversation with Modern Treasury’s CEO Dimitri Dadiomov, its Chief Growth Officer Rachel Pike, and Glenbrook’s Erin McCune. You’ll hear:

  • The creation story of Modern Treasury and the market conditions that proved demand
  • The central role of enterprise payments operations
  • How payments as a service is evolving as a business
  • How its customers deploy its range of capabilities
  • Why ACH is taking off in the fintech space

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Video
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP155_ModernTreasury.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:12pm EDT

In this wide ranging Payments on Fire® episode featuring gateway provider NMI, you’ll hear how payment industry roles continue to evolve as tech and consumer preferences change. Topics covered include:

  • The evolution of touchless payments from QR to Tap on Phone NFC transactions
  • What a gateway does
  • How a white label provider sells and who uses its services
  • What an ISV needs to think about when considering the role of payments facilitator
  • COVID-19’s impact on merchant and consumer payments

Take a listen to this conversation with Kyle Pexton, president and CFO of NMI and Nick Starai, NMI’s Chief Strategy Officer as they talk with Glenbrook’s George Peabody about the arrival of the NextGen ISO and how NMI is helping them, their bank customers, ISVs, and VARs get SMBs into payments acceptance.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

Direct download: EP154_NMI.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:23am EDT

Fast payments will move the US payments market. But to get there, we need fintech to expose those capabilities. Zelle, the RTP Network, Same Day ACH, push to card, and eventually FedNow all need providers that connect up to those rails. For an enterprise or its software developers, a single integration to all sure would be easier. In this Payments on Fire® episode featuring Dwolla, you’ll hear:

  • A practitioner’s view of how ACH and RTP differ and are being used?
  • Why B2B digital payments are growing and what you need to know what’s enabling that growth
  • Learn what a provider must do to bring multiple payment systems to its enterprise customers. It isn’t simple

Take a listen to this conversation with Dwolla’s Brady Harris and Adam Steenhard as they talk about realtime access to fast payments (and more) with Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Video
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP153_Dwolla.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:39pm EDT

  • Curious about how fast payments systems like Zelle, the RTP Network, and FedNow work?
  • Many fast payments use cases aren’t about speed. Find out why.
  • Fast payment systems are national “must haves” around the world.

Take a listen to this conversation with Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and ACI Worldwide’s Craig Ramsey.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Video snapshot
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP152_FastPayments_with_ACI.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:25pm EDT

Glenbrook’s fintech payment series continues with this look at Veem in a deep convo with Marwan Forzley, CEO.

  • Curious about how fintechs solve client problems?
  • Fintechs aren’t just about payments; they blend commerce enablement into their offerings
  • The payment solution that solves the data problems - as well as moves the money - provides the most benefit to the customer
  • Did you know that fintechs don’t do anything new? They just do it better.

Take a listen to George and Veem’s CEO Marwan Forzley as they talk about how Veem built its international payment network for small and medium business (SMB) customers. Listen to Marwan describe the commerce services and integrations Veem has done to drive traffic over the network.

Come to the website for:

  • Expanded show notes
  • Podcast transcript
  • The complete catalog of Payments on Fire® episodes
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule

 

Direct download: EP151_Veem.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:18pm EDT

  • Curious about how fintechs solve client problems?
  • Fintechs aren’t just about payments; they blend commerce enablement into their offerings
  • The payment solution that solves the data problems - as well as moves the money - provides the most benefit to the customer
  • Did you know that fintechs don’t do anything new? They just do it better.

Take a listen to George and RoadSync’s CEO Robin Gregg as they take a deeper look into how fintech’s solve specific problems for specific industry segments. RoadSync provides payments and commerce services to the logistics and trucking industries.

Come to the website for:

Direct download: EP150_RoadSync.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:05pm EDT

  • How do you secure bank to bank transfers between counter parties when the payment system itself lacks strong authentication?
  • Can you balance the cost, speed, and security of transactions across multiple payment networks?

In this episode of the Payments on Fire® fintech series, join Glenbrook’s Nicole Pinto and George Peabody as they speak with Eli Polanco, CEO and Founder of Nivelo. Her company offers risk scoring for ACH transactions to improve payment success rates and reduce fraudulent transactions. Listen as she speaks to her entrepreneurial experience and insight into the evolution of bank-to-bank payments.

Show notes include:

  • A look at the ACH and its advantages
  • Useful links to other sources
  • Podcast transcript
  • Video snapshot
  • The Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule

 

Direct download: EP149_Nivelo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:34pm EDT

There's a huge shift on the horizon.

  • Want to learn about the state of cryptocurrencies in payments today?
    What about the entrepreneur’s journey in leading edge fintech and payments technology?

Take a listen as Glenbrook partners George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan talk crypto, Diem, CDBCs, and the evolution of digital money with Ran Goldi, CEO of First Digital Assets Group. Goldi’s entrepreneurial story and experience with VC are well worth hearing as are his predictions for digital money’s future.

Show notes include:

  • A deep dive into cryptocurrency evolution
  • Links to other sources
  • Podcast transcript
  • Video snapshot of Goldi's elevator pitch
  • The Payments on Fire® episode catalog
  • The Glenbrook Education schedule
Direct download: EP148_First_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:00pm EDT

Prepaid cards are the “apps” of the card world. Join George and Fiserv’s Head of Prepaid Dom Morea as they introduce prepaid’s twin modalities - open loop and closed loop - and then dive into how the gift card industry has morphed into a far broader set of uses cases. And plan to return for the next episode as they discuss open loop’s evolution.


Card payments have four modalities:

  • Charge Cards. There are charge cards that are a form of very short term credit, you pay off in full the monthly statement
  • Credit Cards add the option of revolving all or a portion of the debt obligation and, if you do, you pay interest on those charges

Both of these are products that we buy as consumers or businesses. And we’re paying with money we don’t have at the moment of the transaction. They are “pay after” products.

  • Debit Cards. Debit Cards, on the other hand, are a feature of a specific checking account. It draws on funds that are available right now. It’s a “pay now” method. As soon as the issuer authorizes the transaction, a hold for that amount is placed on funds in your account.
  • Prepaid Card. The final modality operates in “pay before” mode. That’s the prepaid model where funds have been placed in an account to be spent at a later date. Like debit, prepaid draws on funds that are already in place. In most cases, the prepaid funds owned by an accountholder are pooled in a single bank account.

Prepaid is used in two different manners

  1. Open loop prepaid cards are network branded (think Visa and Mastercard). They can be used anywhere the network’s cards are accepted.
  2. The second approach is closed loop. This is the domain of the gift card where a merchant has pre-sold an obligation to provide goods or services up to the value in the prepaid account.

Prepaid Use Cases Abound

Prepaid is big business. Go into any chain drugstore and you’ll see a rack with both open and closed loop prepaid cards for sale. For years, the physical footprint of that “prepaid mall” has been the most profitable square footage in the store.

The prepaid world has some very interesting dynamics. Unlike credit card products that may be issued to millions of cardholders and used for all kinds of purchases, a prepaid program may only serve a few thousand and may be locked down for special purposes.

The Apps of Cards

That’s why we think of prepaid as the “apps” of the card world. Prepaid lends itself to some very specific use cases and program types.

In this first of two interviews with Dom Morea, Fiserv’s Head of Prepaid, we cover closed loop prepaid and some of the new and growing use cases Fiserv has supported, often driven by COVID-19.

Here’s Dom discussing B2B use cases for closed loop prepaid programs:

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Direct download: EP147_Fiserv_Dom_Morea.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:45pm EDT

In our payments education workshops, we make the point that today’s fintechs rarely do something entirely new. At the macro level, our activities and the transactions they produce haven’t changed. We buy food and clothing. We pay rent.

But where and how we do these things has been transformed by technology.

A Great Time to Be a Fintech

Fintechs are the newer, nimbler businesses that are most often changing how we do things. We buy tickets online, get takeout using our mobile phones, and file insurance claims via an app.

Fintech entrepreneurs are busting old processes with much improved user experiences and “value for money” propositions.

It’s a great time to be a fintech.

The building blocks are in place. Powerful cloud-based capabilities are common. APIs connect these tools. Rich data and machine learning generate specific, actionable insights. iOS and Android give smartphones super powers. Business models like payment facilitation help some fintechs. You can even become a bank.

Multiplayer Fintech Builds a Winning Service

Individual fintechs are partnering with others to develop and deliver compelling new services. This is multiplayer fintech. Think of it as the fintech supply chain. The direct provider of services to the customer uses the specific payments capabilities of other fintechs to expand and strengthen what it delivers to its customers.

This approach lets the provider get to market faster with better capabilities than its competitors. That builds a competitive moat for a period of time. And expands the company’s revenues through a broader range of services.

Not Always Easy in B2B

The ability of these fintechs to displace incumbent vendors and processes (“How we’ve always done it”) can be hindered by the target company’s size and reliance on legacy systems. Their complexity presents a barrier. Dismantling it can take a lot of time and change management process support.

For mid-sized firms, however, the choice to shift to cloud-based service delivery is fast becoming a no-brainer. The work from home imperative has only accelerated the decision.

Prospering Despite COVID

We all know that the Travel and Hospitality industries have taken a COVID-inflicted beating. But not every company serving those needs has suffered.

TripActions, focused on corporate travel, just raised $155M at a $5B valuation to help enterprises analyze travel and expense data.

Join TripActionsRobin Gandhi and George as they talk about how TripActions has prospered in the last year with its travel expense management service that makes both the COF and the employee smile.

TripActions has employed those building blocks and partnerships with firms like Visa, Stripe, and Modern Treasury. Using the multiplayer fintech approach, TripActions now has a service that has rewritten how an enterprise manages its travel and expense management processes. For the employee, the hated expense report submission process can be virtually eliminated.

TripActions’ services could not have been built even five years ago. Without today’s technical building blocks and those partner-provide capabilities, TripActions could not have built its services and hit the market as it has.

It’s a good time to be a fintech.

Here’s Robin talking about multiplayer fintech: 

Read the Transcript at the Payments on Fire® website
Expert payments industry commentary at Payments Views
The latest Payments News. Subscribe here
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Direct download: EP146_TripActions.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:46pm EDT

GPay is Google’s app for payments, financial services, rewards, and, is expanding its capabilities, its partnerships, and its ambitions. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan as they talk GPay with Steve Klebe, Google's head of GPay business development and Google's Processor and Partnerships work.

Fairly recently, Google’s payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today’s GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

Way More Than a Wallet

A lot has happened since Steve joined us in July 2019.

GPay has added incentives and loyalty more deeply as well as added expense management with automatic receipt discovery when sent to your Gmail account or via the camera. The incentives can turn into real money.

In the U.S. Google has teed up its Plex bank account offerings in partnership with Citi and Stanford FCU (other FIs to come) for launch in 2021. You can already add bank accounts to GPay through Google’s partnership with Plaid.

GPay is becoming a very competent user interface to the banking services offered by the FIs themselves. Google provides the UX and the data that matters. The bank does what it does.

Does this disintermediate the banks or give them a new channel through which they can offer their services? We will decide but personal experience suggests the GPay interface has a lot going for it.

Google has added these new capability and consolidated others under the single GPay roof. Its ambitions now go beyond simply being a repository for payment credentials and loyalty cards with a sprinkling of P2P payments on top.

Exercising Open Banking

One of the major payments and fintech trends for 2021 is open banking, the ability of third parties to access accountholder data.

PSD2 has driven this in Europe and India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI), both pushed by mandate, enables a vigorous open banking ecosystem in that country. Google Pay, formerly Tez, has been a huge success in India. Of course, market pressure is the driver in the U.S.

Google is now exploring the potential for GPay to assume the role of "super app" along the lines of WeChat Pay or Alipay. Yes, that’s a big leap but there are hints of its ambitions. For example: Google has built over 100 HTML games optimized for low bandwidth networks and low memory smartphones, all targeted toward supporting its NBU (Next Billion Users) effort. GPay will be one of the presentation surfaces for these GameSnack.

Fairly recently, Google’s payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today’s GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

 

Read the transcript

Find more podcasts at Payments on Fire®
Read expert payments industry commentary at Payments Views
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Direct download: EP145_GPay.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:22pm EDT

A Global Phenom

Realtime Retail Payments (RTRP) systems are a global phenomenon. These systems exist or will soon in over 50 countries around the world. Some have been in operation for decades. The UK’s Faster Payments system, operated by Mastercard’s Vocalink unit, has been in operation for over ten years. Still others are still in the design stage.

These account-to-account systems (A2A) have gained in regulator popularity because:

  • They are fast. The receiver has near instant availability
  • They are push payment systems. Transactions don’t take place unless the sender has enough money to fund the transaction. In other words, authorization takes place before the transaction
  • User authentication is up to the financial institution
  • These systems operate year round, 24x7
  • They are inexpensive. Transaction pricing is fixed, regardless of the value of the payment itself
  • They have rich data carrying capability
  • Some include a new message type called Request for Payment, essentially a digital invoice message that prompts the payer to send money and smooths account reconciliation.

Still New to the US

Most Americans still have no idea there’s a new national payment system in operation. Or that a similar one will begin operation in a few years. Wallets like Venmo and the Cash App abound. But an entirely new set of payment rails? That happens once in a generation.

Some of those Americans, on the other hand, may have experienced what a system like this can do. Zelle is a fast push payment system that moves money between banks accounts. But Zelle is more of a directory-enabled messaging layer. The money movement between banks relies on older payment rails like ACH and wires. New Age messaging and user experience; old fashioned settlement.

Key RTP Characteristics

Payments geeks, like Payments on Fire® listeners, know that the Real Time Payments Network takes a different approach. Operated by bank processor, The Clearing House, the RTP Network leaves management of the user experience and the use case up to the bank, the processor, or the provider serving a particular industry.

The RTP Network provides:

  • The messaging between the sender and the receiver and each of their banks
  • Nearly instant availability of the funds into the receiver’s account (by network rule)
  • 24/7/365 operation (ACH and wires take a break after working hours)
  • Instant settlement between the sending and receiving financial institutions

In short: the RTP Network provides the plumbing and pipes. What it looks like and how it’s used is up to another stakeholder.

Members of the network are financial institutions who either expose the RTP rails themselves or sponsor third party access so that those entities can make use of them. Nothing groundbreaking there.

An RTRP with RTGS

One of the impressive features of the RTP Network is that interbank settlement, the movement of funds between the sender and receiver banks, happens in realtime. The two banks settle their positions instantly. Settlement happens in realtime for every transaction. That’s what a realtime gross settlement (RTGS) does.

Contrast that with a system like Zelle that provides instant messaging among the stakeholders but typically leaves the final movement of monies between banks to an overnight batch process via ACH. And this is net, not gross, settlement. The amount includes all of the day’s transactions.

The RTP network achieves its RTGS capabilities using the following technique:

  • RTP requires each member financial institution to pre-fund monies sufficient to handle its transactions. The money to operate the system has to be in place ahead of time. This eliminates settlement risk between the banks
  • Each FI’s monies are pooled in a single pooled account, owned in common by the RTP Network’s member financial institutions. This pooled account is held at the the Federal Reserve
  • The Clearing House maintains a ledger that tracks every transaction, that debits and credits FI pairs in realtime for each transaction
  • Each Member FI is responsible for making sure it has enough funds to cover each of the transactions initiated by its accountholders. Each FI uses another open loop payment system, FedWire, to move monies into and out of its share of the pooled account as needed.

A Maturing System

That’s a lot of background to help US contrast this system against the other four mostly digital systems in the U.S. (If you’re not clear on that, join us for the best in payments education at a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp®)

The RTP Network is in its fifth year of operation. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Steve Ledford updates us on:

  • The growth in member financial institutions
  • The growth in transaction volume
  • The expanding set of use cases
  • Who is using the RTP Network
  • How COVID-19 accelerated usage in new use cases

So, take a listen.

Here’s Steve talking about those new COVID-driven use cases.

For a snapshot of how the faster payments phenomenon is growing in the U.S. here is the 2020 Faster Payments Barometer.

Read the episode transcript

Find more podcasts, visit Glenbrook's Payments on Fire® site
Read expert payments industry commentary at Payments Views.
Read the latest at Payments News. Subscribe here.
Read our COVID-19 Payments Industry eBook

Direct download: EP144_RTP_Update.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:24pm EDT

Continuing our payments in fintech series, we talk about one of the major changes in the payments industry over the last few years: the installment lending phenomenon. Companies like AfterPay, Klarna, and Affirm (that just IPO'd and saw its stock double in one day) are leaders in this buy now, pay later (BNPL) space and appeal to Millennial and Gen Z users as well as the merchants selling to them.

These firms offer a range of installment payment options: three, six, and 12 month payback periods are typical. The interest rate gets lower the shorter the payback period and, for the shortest period, that cost is eliminated. The merchant pays for it as promotional financing. These installment loan options generally increase the size of the sale and, because the BNPL provider may take on the risk and guarantee the sale, they remove a measure of risk from the merchant. In other words, for multiple merchant categories, they increase sales.

BNPL providers accept multiple methods of payment: credit and debit cards and, of course, they may encourage the use of ACH as a low cost funding source.

For younger demographics, a majority of them without credit cards and credit histories, these services enable them to transact.

Sezzle is a player in this arena with a unique, very short term product that charges no interest to the consumer because the purchase is paid back in six weeks. The costs are born by its merchant customers. Sezzle has particular appeal to sub-prime or young consumers who may not even have a credit score.

Take a listen as Sezzle’s Chris Bixby, VP of Growth, and Glenbrook’s George Peabody dissect the Sezzle proposition and discuss the changing face of Retail in the post-COVID era.

Watch Chris describe why his customers choose the Sezzle payment option:

Direct download: EP143_Sezzle.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:41pm EDT

Faster Payments: Fundamental Tech for Payments Innovation

Payments innovation comes in waves. And the wave that’s breaking on the U.S. - having swept over 50 countries around the world - is faster payments. Also referred to as Real-time Retail Payments (RTRP) these systems are fundamentally different from what’s come before:

  • They are push payment systems
  • They are new, systemically important domestic systems
  • Risk and economic models are dramatically different than what’s come before
  • They run 24/7 365 days a year. Go ahead, push money to and between accounts during your Sunday midnight snack
  • Novel messaging and data formats open up new use cases and deep integration opportunities

Most important, these are “clean sheet of paper” payment systems built for the Digital Age.

Glenbrook has been working with these systems for over a decade. Our global experience gives us unique insight into how these systems are used and their real and potential impact on multiple stakeholders.

Why This Course is For You

If you are responsible for payment products and services in any way and you're looking to differentiate your services, join Glenbrook’s Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan on this deep dive examination of how faster payments is fundamentally altering payments industry dynamics.

Here are other reasons for you to join the workshop:

  • Smart, expert workshop leaders to guide the group through the materials, make it interactive, and love QQ&A
  • A crisp look at what these systems do, don’t do, and how overlay offerings in the UK, India, Australia, and Mexico extend their utility
  • A deep dive into how The Clearing House’s Real Time Payment Network Request for Payment message operates and how the RTP Network settles (it’s a very new approach)
  • Workshop attendees from across the industry bring unique questions and perspectives
  • The workshop description has many more reasons. Check it out.

Take a quick listen to learn more about the workshop from one of its leaders, Russ Jones. George and Russ take a quick, fun tour through why this course is different.

Go here for the workshop detail, schedule, and registration.

Direct download: Faster_with_RJ_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:24pm EDT

The Fintech Phenomenon is rarely about doing something entirely new. It’s about doing things in a new way that better fits the needs of the target market. The fintech model also enables the provider to reach underserved market segments.

Lending is, of course, the core offering of banks. But between their legacy processes, underwriting requirements, compliance demands, and more, they simply aren’t nimble enough to serve new segments in our evolving economy.

And the banking crisis of 2008 left them even more risk averse.

That’s left small business lending wide open to fintechs.

Case in point: the online seller, that small business that makes a product or buys wholesale and sells direct to customers through their own website and, for most, through marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify.

Cash Flow is Everything

Here’s where success can kill a business. If their online store and what they’re selling catches on, they’ve got a tiger by the tail. They’ve already invested their own money to get the store off the ground. But they have to keep buying inventory in order to fulfill orders. Where’s the capital to pay for that inventory to come from in order to do that?

As the founder of multiple small businesses, I can tell you that cash flow management is a daily concern. It’s no different for these Amazon sellers because Amazon pays out every two weeks and it may take a month or more for the funds from some transactions to hit the seller’s bank account. With cash flow “everything” for the SMB, funding business growth is a major challenge. To keep up, you have to reinvest to feed the beast. You take all your earnings and put them into new inventory.

That’s where our guest for this episode comes in. Keith Smith is co-founder and CEO of Payability, a firm that has loaned over $2.5B since 2015 to Amazon and Shopify sellers.

Data Enables the Model

Payability, sitting between the seller and the marketplace, sees massive data sets that help it and its algorithms determine risk. Given the volume of data, the myriad sources of these signals, it’s impossible for humans to do the underwriting. Machine learning can examine far more signals than a human can ever handle. So, as Keith puts it, Payability’s staff “trains the robots” to help the company accurately price financing for those who would otherwise be locked out this kind of business.

The Money Supply Chain

In the business of selling money, you have to have access to it. You have to be part of the money supply chain.

Drastic changes in the finance ecosystem have taken place since 2008. With traditional banks stepping back from small business lending, fintechs have entered the money supply chain, as the new distributor of funds, enabled by their ML-based underwriting and risk models.

The fintech underwriting sophistication has been a boon to traditional sources of financing, both banks and institutional investors. They still sell money; they just do it through the new fintech channel.

The COVID Accelerator

As a funder of online businesses that have benefited from the COVID-driven shift to e-commerce, Payability has prospered in 2020. As Keith put it “we’ve seen four or five years of growth out of a single year.”

In Glenbrook’s payments consulting work, our discussions with merchants, billers, sellers, and their technology parters have included this common refrain. COVID has hurt many but others, able to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the digital shift, have prospered.

Find more podcasts and commentary at Glenbrook's Payments on Fire® site, check out our blog Payments Views, and subscribe to the best payments industry news feed, Payments News. Read our COVID-19 Payments Industry eBook.

Direct download: EP141_Payability.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:05pm EDT

In a crisp explanation of account takeover and authentication risks, George and Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security. They discuss the findings of a recent NuData report and its experience with the sophistication of online fraudsters. NuData’s techniques are all about foiling cybercriminals as they bang at the front door of financial institutions, merchants, streaming services, and more.

Payments on Fire® listeners know that we’ve been taking a steady look at fraud issues over the past few years. Fraudsters have been pouncing on every opportunity, taking advantage of pandemic relief payments as well as the shift from card present to card not present, remote commerce transactions. If this topic didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Measuring and detecting what the fraudsters are up to and their impact is critical. To better understand what’s going on, we speak with Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security, a company that specializes in behavioral biometrics.

NuData published in Q3/2020 its e report on cybersecurity trends. And the findings are really interesting.

What They Found

The current scourge is account takeover. ATO is a concern for financial institutions, for retailers, streaming media companies, and more.

Attack method sophistication goes well beyond reuse of stolen user IDs and brute force password guessing.

It is an arms race of increasingly complex and sophisticated attack and detection techniques.

NuData and others have expertise in behavioral analytics, tools that detect, among other things, bots that are build to emulate human interactions at the account login page. The use of CAPTCHA is one technique to deter these attacks. But the fraudsters have responded, going so far as to establish call center-scale operations with staff endlessly filling in CAPTCHA forms to add the human touch and smarts in what are otherwise highly automated ATO attacks. This is human farming to get around CAPTCHA and other rudimentary defenses.

Financial institutions and retailers aren’t the only targets. In this age of stay at home orders, streaming services have become targets of opportunity. Parasitic use of streaming service accounts has risen as the fraudsters sell streaming service account credentials.

The Defender’s Balancing Act

There are dedicated professionals working on both sides. But the defenders have the harder job. Besides having to protect every door and window, they also have to keep it simple for good users to transact. Adding friction to a transaction flow increases the shopping cart abandonment rate. That’s bad for the ecommerce merchant and insults the customer. It’s a tough balancing act.

Part of that balance is handled by “step up” authentication based on the level of risk. A bank might let a session proceed to a balance inquiry without asking for further customer input. But if a new payee is added to the account, the bank might insist on sending a one time code to the customer via email or SMS.

Getting to Good ASAP

Providers of authentication services see activity from a lot of devices. Building profiles based on these devices and the many variables surrounding each transaction, they use the profiles to efficiently track the behavior of each in order to separate the known good profile from the questionable.

A technique to “get to good” faster is to pool that profiling information in anonymized form from across all of the clients who agree to participate.

COVID Impact

Robert discusses the shifts in fraud given the pandemic. As a percentage of transactions, fraud increased substantially in the travel segment. And for those retailers operating in the physical world the shift to e-commerce was sometimes overwhelming. That’s a story we’ve heard a lot at Glenbrook. Check out our COVID Series book.

Podcast transcript

 

 

 

Direct download: EP140_NuData.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:32pm EDT

Take a listen as George and Deluxe’s President and CEO Barry McCarthy discuss how the company continues to adapt to and prosper in the digital age. Barry talks about the journey the company has taken, in recent times shifting from a conglomerate model grown via acquisition to today’s streamlined and focused small business focused organization.

The Journey from Paper to Digital Services

In Glenbrook’s Payments Boot Camps® we make the point that fintechs rarely invent new functions out of whole cloth. What they do excel at is reimagining and reengineering the processes that incumbent players have been locked into for years.

It’s the incumbent’s inability to adapt that puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

As Charles Darwin put it:

“The species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

We make this point in our training. Incumbent firms, no matter what the industry, survive and succeed over decades only if they have the ability to adapt to change in their environment. You only have to glance at the moves Visa and Mastercard have made over the last five years - the acquisitions of Plaid and Vocalink (among many) come to mind - and it’s obvious adaptation is at the core of their respective strategies.

In this episode, we speak with a company that has over 100 years of adaptation behind it. Starting with the invention of the checkbook a century ago Deluxe Corporation has expanded and adapted its offerings to the digital needs of its customers.

Take a listen as George and Deluxe’s President and CEO Barry McCarthy discuss how the company continues to adapt to and prosper in the digital age. Barry talks about the journey the company has taken, in recent times shifting from a conglomerate model growing by acquisition to today’s more streamlined and focused organization.

 

Direct download: EP139_Deluxe.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:11pm EDT

Open banking. It’s a term we started to hear about at the end of 2016 and since 2019 interest has remained high. That’s according to Google Trends. Along with those searches, the related hot topics were PSD2 and APIs.

Regulation and technology is opening up access to bank accounts for payers, billers, and service providers. But the state of that openness varies by region and country with important consequences for billers, merchants, and their payment providers.

In this wide ranging discussion, George and Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product Officer at GoCardless, cover a range of topics, all through the lens of the company’s primary value proposition, the use of direct debit from bank accounts to enable recurring and one-off payments across 30 different countries.

As you'll appreciate, stitching together a network capable of using the domestic low cost rails (think ACH and BACS) in 30 different countries to provide both domestic and cross-border recurring payments is no easy task.

Topics discussed include:

  • The definition of open banking
  • What the impact of open baking has been
  • Where open banking is taking off, and where it isn’t
  • Recurring payments defined and use cases
  • APIs and integration
  • How a biller or merchant can move customers from one payment method to another
  • Cross-border direct debit
  • And, of course, the GoCardless value proposition, something its financial backers believe in given its recent $95 million raise.

 

Direct download: EP138_GoCardless.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:38pm EDT

Financial inclusion for the poor is a global challenge. In this episode, we dive into the story of Mojaloop, a platform that enables interoperability and transaction routing between mobile money system operators, banks, and other providers. It’s a fascinating, and evolving, story. Take a listen.

= = = = = = 

Individual Benefits, Nation Building Impact

Financial inclusion for the poor is a global challenge. Over two billion adults lack access to financial services. While that number is declining - and in no small part because of the work done by this episode’s guests - that level of digital disenfranchisement and cash dependence suppresses well being at multiple levels:

  • Individuals must spend significant time to pay bills when they must travel to the biller or its agent, never mind travel to acquire cash. Carrying cash, of course, comes with its own set of risks
  • Families suffer as time away from work and home reduces family income
  • Entrepreneurs and small businesses face the same time penalty, high transaction costs, and uncertain credit access
  • Entire countries experience diminished GDP because of productivity losses and transactional friction. Cash-based transactions also fuel the shadow economy, making audits and taxation very difficult

While Kenya's M-Pesa is the most well known exemplar, there are hundreds of systems around the world offering digital payments, bill pay, savings accounts, microlending, and other services to their accountholders. 

Not Without Concerns

Financial inclusion efforts are not without downsides as some credit extension services, riding the e-money rails laid down by the provider, charge usurious rates. Gambling services are similarly problematic.

With success, e-money systems become systemically important to a country and, therefore, pose a level of systemic risk should the operator go offline for technical or security reasons.

And as with every digital activity that touches money, there is the problem of fraud.

But these are not insurmountable challenges. Some are candidates for regulation-based cures. Others can be addressed by providers themselves.

The Network Effect Matters

Another challenge to the growth and health of mobile money systems is interoperability among those systems. In many countries, multiple e-money systems compete for accountholders but do not interoperate. A user on one system cannot send money to a user on another. That condition adds friction, reducing the e-money value proposition for all stakeholders.

The challenge becomes even more acute, and costs rise, when the sender and receiver are in different countries.

Ecosystem Enablement

A thriving digital ecosystem and economy requires the right conditions:

  • Regulation that encourages innovation while also protecting the end user
  • Low cost enabling infrastructure, and
  • User-focused services that meet real needs

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken on financial inclusion for the poor in multiple ways, through support of:

  • Development of guiding principles for the delivery of financial inclusion through the Level One Project
  • Creation of guidance for regulators to speed accountholder onboarding while limiting fraud and risks concerns
  • Support for the development of open loop software designed to speed system interoperability. Called Mojaloop, this open source effort’s goals include the development of a reference platform

In this episode, we dive into the Mojaloop story with two leaders of the work:

It’s a fascinating, and evolving, story. Take a listen. And, if financial inclusion for the poor in developing markets is important to you, get involved with Mojaloop. It's quite a team.

 

Direct download: EP137_Mojaloop2.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:18pm EDT

For a front row seat on payment innovation you have plenty of choices. Yes, Stripe and Square are based in the tech hotbed of the Bay Area and it’s tempting to stare at their success. But a look around the world reveals the evolutionary breadth of how payments are made, regulated, and brought to market. India and China alone reveal how remarkably different approaches can scale to enormous dimensions.

There’s no better guide to what’s happening in payments around the world than Glenbrook’s own Carol Coye Benson. In this episode, Carol and George discuss her new book Global Payments and the Fintech Innovations Changing the Industry.

Carol spent much of the last decade traveling throughout the world consulting to organizations on the impact of technology and business models on national payment infrastructure. The book is informed by the scores of discussions she’s had with tech executives, the leadership of development banks, government agencies, and fintech start-ups.

Take a listen to why she wrote the book, some of what she found, and her take on some of the big questions still to be answered.

Here's how she introduces the book via video:

Direct download: GlobalPaymentsBook.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:38am EDT

2020 has been an active period for payments innovation. COVID-19 has been a forcing function for digital payments across multiple payment domains. “Touchless” and “contactless” payments are now common themes of retailer advertising.

And, of course, many other trends have accelerated this year. Fintechs, mobile wallets, the expansion of open banking initiatives, and point of sale lending are trends with impacts spreading across the market. 2020 has also seen the increased legitimacy of blockchain-based payments as demonstrated by central banks around the world consider and even pilot digital fiat currencies.

These are the topics Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan will present in Glenbrook’s Innovation in Payments Insight Workshop coming up December 8th and 9th. If keeping up with the changes in our industry and developing real insight into the key trends is important, you won’t find better guides than Russ and Yvette.

Take a listen. Check out the agenda.




 

Direct download: EP135_Innovation.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:13pm EDT

COVID is a forcing function for digital channel growth across the world as consumers and businesses reduce their reliance on physical interactions. We’ve seen usage shifts in how bank accountholders in Peru transact - from branch to digital - as well as big shift in payment behavior.

We outlined a lot of this in our own COVID series on Payments Views.

Many merchants have turned to online as a matter of survival. Many restaurants, for example, have added order ahead and curbside pickup as standard offerings just to stay in business.

Our assessment is that, even with an effective vaccine and adequate immunization rates, we’re never going to return to the same point. E-commerce transactions have increased, yet again, permanently. How much volume returns to the physical point of sale domain once COVID is behind us is unknown. But it’s not going to go back to previous levels.

That shift is an opportunity for many in the payments industry, including fraudsters, those unwelcome stakeholders. They are taking advantage of merchants who weren’t prepared for their new or increased online payment volumes.

We’ve spoken with a number of fraud management firms on Payments on Fire®. In this episode we speak with Eyal Raab, VP of Sales, at fraud management company Riskified about his firm’s expanding approach to fraud management for merchants whose goal is to maximize authorization rates.

Fraud management is complex. Merchant needs vary considerably. And what the fraudsters are up to constantly changes. Payment fraud management and fraud are both growth industries.

 

Direct download: EP134_Riskified.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:57pm EDT

You’d have to be aggressively disinterested in the payments industry not to be aware of its attraction to investors. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to dampen the interest, if not outright enthusiasm, for the payments industry among investors of all stripes.
Actually, the pandemic has lit a fire under key industry segments like the e-commerce domain, digital banking, and disbursements.

The dynamics of change pushing the payments industry ahead are only increasing.

Incumbent Consolidation

The payments industry has been dominated by networks and processors. While networks have remained largely independent, the processing industry has undergone tremendous consolidation over the last decade, accelerated recently by the giant acquisition of First Data by Fiserv. Scale really matters in processing.

But that scale comes at the cost of agility because the incumbents must rely on the systems they already have and the ones they’ve acquired. Consolidation onto just a few platforms is hard. And that means incumbents don’t benefit as clearly from newer technologies based on cloud computing and APIs.

Start-ups Abound

While investor interest in what are typically public companies remains strong, it is interest in start-ups and young companies demonstrating early success that drives early investors. These companies need cash to grow and equity financing is a primary source. It could be an individual with cash looking for a higher return on a portion of her portfolio. Family and friends as well as wealthy individuals are typical of “angel” investing.

Venture capital is another source that often fuels the shift from proof of concept to the first minimum viable product and, often beyond, through multiple rounds of raising venture capital.

Fueling the Next Incumbents

Fueling the growth from business teenager-hood to young adult are growth equity firms that bulk up the business’s overall capabilities. While a cool technical idea can form the core of a new business, it takes business infrastructure like a global salesforce, enterprise-grade financial controls, and more to build a company that can execute on its potential.

In this Payments on Fire® podcast, George talks with Steve Sarracino, Founder and Partner of Activant Capital, a growth equity firm based in Greenwich, CT. Steve’s firm is an investor in Finix and Bolt, companies that precisely fit his investment criteria. And he loves the payments industry for its past and, of course, for its potential.

(Listen to Payments on Fire® Episode 106 with FInix's Richie Serna)

Like those of us at Glenbrook, Steve sees lots of change ahead for the payments industry. And, like us at Glenbrook, he wants his company to influence and prosper from its evolution.

Direct download: EP133_Activant.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:06pm EDT

This Payments on Fire® podcast is a joint production of Citibank and Glenbrook. Tony McLaughlin of Citibank interviewed our partner Erin McCune about the U.S. payments market and business transactions in particular.

The U.S. payments landscape is in the midst of unprecedented change -- triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, new faster payment infrastructure, open banking and an overall acceleration of digitization. Business payments are particularly ripe for change.

The pandemic has exposed businesses’ reliance on manual processes and motivating digitization and cloud migration. Although businesses have talked about pursuing electronic payments and treasury modernization efforts for some time the pandemic reveals the risk associated with manual processes dependent upon being in an office and reliant on the mail for delivery of invoices, checks, and other business documents. All of a sudden back office digitization is a c-suite concern.

The emergence of faster payments has also catalyzed change in the business payments space. Real time infrastructures were purpose built for business transactions. Not because they are fast -- suppliers grant their buyers payment terms, it’s not about speed. The new infrastructures have robust data capabilities that are very important to business-to-business payments.

Small businesses write and receive the majority of B2B checks and faster payment has tremendous potential to erode their reliance on manual invoicing and payment processes. Request-to-pay (R2P) capabilities associated with new real time rails are effectively electronic invoices, with the added value of a round trip payment logically associated with the invoice. For many smaller businesses, this could be the key to eliminating checks. For larger organizations where a single payment is associated with a number of invoices, and there is a need to provide more complex explanations of what a payment is for ISO 20022 remit messages (separate from the payment transaction itself) prove useful. 

Additionally, there’s an enormous potential associated with API integrations between business back office solutions, bank partners, and payment infrastructure. Even relatively small businesses have an array of financial providers: multiple bank accounts, a credit facility, an ERP or accounting system, a CRM, a billing/invoicing solution, and other additional enterprise software tools. Knitting information together across systems and using these different solutions to embed and automate processes associated with sending, receiving, and applying payments provides significant value to businesses.

Speaking of data sharing, it’s useful to note that open banking in the U.S. is market-led, rather than the result of a mandate. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening -- there’s a great deal of momentum. Security concerns and the advent of new faster payments rails are pushing financial institutions to innovate and collaborate. Nacha’s Phixius and Afinis solutions and FDX are examples of cooperation between industry players. The card networks are also making acquisitions in this space, with Visa acquiring Plaid and Mastercard acquiring Finicity.

To add to everything else that’s happening, there’s a lot of buzz around CBDC at the moment. It’s a global phenomenon. The United States has a strong interest in the concept because of our desire to maintain the dollar’s position as a dominant currency for international trade. However, it’s still too early to know what a CBDC would look like in the U.S. and how consumers and businesses would interact with a new type of government-issued coin.

Tony asked Erin how the global pandemic has impacted Glenbrook. She observes that our focus at Glenbrook hasn’t changed dramatically as a result of the pandemic (although we’re not traveling like we used to!): we were working with clients across the value chain to digitize payments and related business processes before the COVID-19 and continue to do so today. Demand has intensified, but it hasn’t really shifted focus.

But in the midst of societal upheaval as a result of the pandemic, at Glenbrook we are also thinking deeply about how we can employ our expertise to help businesses and consumers at risk. We do a lot of work on financial inclusion in the developing world. How can we apply that thinking here at home, to help businesses and consumers weather uncertainty, bolster the economic recovery, and build an equitable foundation for financial health and sustainable businesses on a longer term basis? We don’t quite know yet, but we are excited to explore new avenues for our consulting practice.

 

Direct download: EP132_ErinonCiti.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30pm EDT

NACHA’s Phixius is a new service for the exchange of the information about a payment between the sender and receiver. Take a listen to Payments on Fire® host George Peabody as he discusses Phixius with NACHA Advisor Peter Tapling. He helps us understand Phixius, how it works and where it applies. It’s a compelling idea.

One of the long standing shortcomings in payments systems has been the degree to which the data about a payment can be shared. If we can share the data about the payment, to have it run alongside the payment instructions, then we can do things like:

  • Streamline bill payment
  • Streamline supply chain payments
  • We are able to get away from sharing bank account information
  • We can check the status of accounts, regardless of financial institution

One of the advantages of check payments is that, when physically mailed, the letter can contain the check as well as an explanation of what that check is paying for, perhaps including copies of all the invoices. That data is hugely important to the supplier.

This payments metadata, the data that describes what a payment is for and all of the conditions around a transaction, is hugely valuable. Both the sender and receiver need it. It is used by every accounts payable and receivable department. Sure, it’s great to get paid. But without the metadata, it can be difficult to know the account to credit or to know which invoice, or invoices, the payment applies to.

Communication of payment metadata has been a bear. Some payment rails, wires for instance, have little or no ability to carry data beyond what’s needed for the payment itself. The card rails have only limited descriptive capability. ACH messages have some data carrying capability but usage has been limited.

Many of today’s realtime system like the UK’s Faster Payments and the RTP Network in the US use the rich encoding capability of ISO 20022 to represent the metadata. That’s a big improvement on how to represent payment metadata.

Another reason communicating this information has been difficult is the reality that today, when this data is shared, it happens as a result of a bilateral connection via API. A service provider attempting to bridge this data gap would have to have dozens and dozens of these bilateral API relationships, if not hundreds, to reach all participants in a major industry segment such as automobile or aircraft manufacturing. That’s impossible.

NACHA, rule making body of the US ACH system, has a role to play here because the ACH carries 62% of payment volume, excluding wires of course, and 66% of supplier payment volumes.

Recognizing that role, NACHA has made an out-of-model move with the introduction of its Phixius services. NACHA is now the operator of a system that carries payment metadata regardless of which payment system actually moves the money. Phixius could be useful in wires, RTP Network, Zelle, ACH, and even cards.

Phixius sits in between financial institutions, payments services providers, and others that provide payment services, to serve as a hub for the sharing of payment information. Each party connects to Phixius just once, eliminating the need for one-to-one integrations. Phixius refers to these stakeholders as credentialed service providers.

Phixius is defining operating rules and data requirements for individual uses cases.

Phixius uses distributed ledger technology to build trust among its participants in the data shared over the system. Phixius itself does not store the data nor does the distributed ledger contain the data about the transaction. It only contains a unalterable mathematical representation of the fact that the sending and receiving parties vouch for the data and agree on how it is used. The ledger can be audited by Phixius and the two parties involved in the transaction. But another node on the network could not interrogate the ledger to determine who is trading with whom.

So, it’s refreshing to see an instance of blockchain technology doing useful work, at scale, that has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.

NACHA designed Phixius. It recruited important users of the system. Phixius is live in pilot and a broader rollout is scheduled in Q4 or Q1 of 2021.

NACHA is not a well heeled organization with tons of money to market the Phixius brand to the fintech and financial institution communities. The idea is compelling but, as a network build, faces an adoption curve that will be climbed on the strength of that idea.

Direct download: EP131_Phixius.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:43pm EDT

In this Payments on Fire® George and Scott Giordano, VP and Sr. Counsel, Privacy and Compliance at data privacy management firm Spirion, talk about what can and has gone wrong, the high cost of sanctions for failure, and how to reduce the risks attendant with the handling of personal data.

 

Privacy.

It’s a huge issue. Many of us are concerned as individuals with how our personal data - our personally identifiable information or PII - is shared by social media and throughout today’s massive data ecosystem without our knowledge or without our case by case granting of permission.

As a result of those concerns, various jurisdictions around the work have enacted privacy-focused legislation that has teeth. The EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) focuses on data protection and privacy where consent for PII is required. It also addresses data domicility, where the data about an EU system must reside. GDPR applies to entities doing business in Europe - i.e. it applies to thousands of US companies.

In the US, one of the leading regulatory steps is on the ballot this year in California. Its proposed data privacy regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), would provide for:

* The right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared;
* The right to delete personal information collected from them (with some exceptions);
* The right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information; and
* The right to non-discrimination for exercising their CCPA rights.

Any business doing business in CA will be affected by the CCPA, including data brokers.

These regulations are an attempt to return a measure of control to individuals over the sea of personal data that makes it possible, for instance, for an entity to correlate the data of a handful of payment transactions to identify an individual with high confidence.

The ramifications of these regulations are many. In this podcast, we hear of how a Midwest bank, that does not business itself in the EU, became subject to GDPR regulations because of the activities of one of its clients.

We are living in a world where the social implications of wide data sharing are obvious.

What’s not so clear are the business ramifications of privacy regulations and the data custodianship they demand.

In this Payments on Fire® George and Scott Giordano, VP and Sr. Counsel, Privacy and Compliance at data privacy management firm Spirion, talk about what can and has gone wrong, the high cost of sanctions for failure, and how to reduce the risks attendant with the handling of personal data.

We are at the beginning of a decades long evolution of how privacy is supported and data is managed. Shaping that path will be regulations, the decisions reached through multiple lawsuits, and the response by technology and data providers.

Direct download: EP130_Spirion.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:18pm EDT

In this episode, George speaks with Rafael Lourenco, EVP and Partner of fraud management provider ClearSale. Rafael returns to Payments on Fire® to address COVID’s impact including new online threats and the consumer behavior changes that challenge the customer checkout experience and fraud detection.

 

COVID-19 has contorted how merchants do business into new shapes. COVID-19 is forcing some merchants, often inexperienced with the online world, to make a swift digital transformation with all of its benefits and downside fraud risk.

For example, numerous brick-and-mortar merchants have rushed to embrace online commerce as they attempt to fill the revenue hole in their business. Others, as we’ll hear in this Payments on Fire® podcast, have suddenly found new demand for what they offer.

Even fraud management companies have found themselves dealing with unexpected shifts, including new behaviors of good customers.

* Consumers new to the online channel have suddenly appeared. Their checkout and payments behavior maybe confused and uneven.
* Prior customers may decide to become quarantine refugees and move in with friends and family at a different address. The new shipping addresses raises a red flag at the merchant’s fraud detection system.

As we’ve seen countless times after natural disasters, fraudsters see opportunity in the misfortune of others. The pandemic is no different. It’s also encouraged fraudsters who formerly operated in the physical world to attack the online channel. After all, they need to make a living, too.

Rafael takes us through these scenarios, what ClearSale has observed since very early in the COVID-19 outbreak, and some of the adjustments ClearSale’s full outsourced fraud management service has had to make.

He also discusses the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) in fraud management. ML/AI has dropped ClearSale’s need for manual review from 30% of orders 10 years ago to 5% today.

ClearSale differentiates its service partly based on the extent fraud analysts examine the case before a questionable transation is declined. Rafael points out that, unlike an individual merchant who must maintain the same staffing level despite volume fluctuations (think Cyber Monday and mid-July), ClearSale’s fraud analyst team works across multiple merchant categories. That means, when one segments is busy another is less so. The result is “staffing in the cloud.”

For more on how COVID-19 has affected payment flows and the payments industry, read Glenbrook’s COVID Impact series. 

Direct download: EP129_ClearSale.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:17pm EDT

Take a listen to Rapyd's Eric Rosenthal and Glenbrook’s George Peabody as they discuss Rapyd’s swift global expansion, its ability to quickly build new capabilities, and the firm’s cloud-based tech stack. It uses its “white label PayPal” model to payment-enable a wide range of companies and use cases.

Programming Payments Has Been Hard

Among the many evolutions in the payments industry over the last decade, and only accelerating today, is the programmability of payments. Prior to that, a portion of payments providers - gateways, processors, and even networks - provided access to their services via direct integration to whatever interface they cared to expose. The API is the layer now employed for that purpose.

A single interface to core services is, of course, the basic stock in trade of a gateway, an outfit that exposes a single interface to its customers with the promise, among many, of reaching a broad swatch of acquirers out the other side. Networks like American Express and Mastercard have long provided access of their own.

But this approach, for the many merchants and businesses shifting to digital payments, had a number of shortcomings.

First, none of these integrations were truly comprehensive. One gateway could get you to the UK, but others were necessary to reach the rest of Europe, often on a country by country basis because payments are local and domestic. To sell in a country, you have to connect to the methods its citizens use. Cards along won’t do it. So, global reach through a minimum set of providers was a challenge.

A second concern was the effort required to connect to so many providers. A merchant would have to carefully assess the ROI for each development effort in order to sell, say, in Austria or Thailand. Or to take advantage of the fraud services of American Express. Implementing and maintaining so may interfaces - and the contracts or partnerships that exist alongside the technical effort - is a lot of work.

Things Have Improved - A Lot

The way over these barriers is now broadly available. A number of providers have applied a common insight - that merchants, enterprises, and sellers will flock to a provider that offers a single, straightforward API that abstracts the complexity of payments so that they can focus more on their commercial goals.

Multiple providers now offer a single integration through which merchant can reach a global audience and the global range of payment methods.

That’s one of the insights that inspired firms like Braintree, Stripe, Adyen, and others, including the firm Rapyd, the subject of this Payments on Fire® episode.

Built on the Cloud

Rapyd is a young company building out its capability to global scale in a very short period of time. In this discussion with Rapyd’s Eric Rosenthal we hear how the firm’s use of Amazon Web Services has allowed the company to scale operations around the world in a reliable and, critically, compliant manner with respect to data privacy and domicility.

Eric illustrates the company’s model - a white label PayPal as he calls it - through an example of Rapyd supporting a cash collection supply chain challenge for a global CPG manufacturer.

Flexibility and Speed

In our payments consulting work on behalf of merchants and billers, when we support their choice of payments provider, we increasingly see one or more firms like Rapyd competing against incumbents like First Data and Chase. We expect to see them more often in the future.

Incumbents using legacy infrastructure lack the flexibility to be responsive. We frequently hear about the years long implantation projects some legacy providers require. While a single firm may have built, at one time or another, every possible bit of functionality a merchant may want, the reality is that such breadth is not available on a single platform. Hence those long integration timelines.

The ability of these newer entrants to address incremental use cases is impressive. Of course, some of their components lack the functional depth achieved by incumbent competitors. But that gap will narrow with time and faster than in prior years.

By outsourcing the core plumbing to cloud providers like AWS or Microsoft’s Azure, firms like Rapyd are able to put more wood behind the arrow aimed at their customer’s business goals. Freed of much of the operational burden of running the plumbing, they can deploy their talents where the impact is greatest. And that changes the game.

Direct download: EP128_Rapyd.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:41pm EDT

The transition away from paper to an all digital payments world has been underway for decades. But in the last few years the pace has accelerated. Global tech availability and focused development talent is letting software eat the payments world. Other enablers include business models such as payments facilitation and the focus on commerce, not just payments, for merchants.

COVID-19 has simply added fuel to the fire. In May, for the first time, Mastercard reported that over 50% of its volume was card not present, transactions all in the digital payment space. The pandemic is yet another forcing function pushing digital payments deeper into our lives, across the key payment use cases employed by individuals, merchants, enterprises, and government.

Keeping up with all this is what we do at Glenbrook. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Glenbrook's Russ Jones and George talk about what’s hot and how that gets examined in our upcoming Digital Payments Insight Workshop. It will be held online June 24 and 25th. For more on the workshop, check it out here.

Russ and George talk about the online training experience and how interactivity is supported by the tools we use and the flow we establish. So, take a quick listen to get a taste of what’s hot. If you like it, we look forward to seeing you at the workshop. No trains, planes, or automobiles needed.

Direct download: EP127_Digital_Payments.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:22pm EDT