Payments on Fire™

This episode of Payments on Fire covers two topics - payments in Atlanta and the essential challenge of online authentication and identity. May in Atlanta - Fintech South and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp Everyone in the payments industry knows that Atlanta is a hotbed of activity. Coming shortly to Atlanta are two fintech-focused events that will add to the goings-on. The Fintech South conference...

The rise of Chinese mobile payment systems is the top global mobile payments story of the last few years. Alipay and WeChat Pay serve hundreds of millions of users with payments, loyalty programs, merchant coupons, and more. QR codes are used to initiate many of these interactions especially within the point of sale (POS) domain. When there isn't a legacy payment infrastructure in place, software...

Mid-market financial institutions have enormously strong relationships with their banking customers. But their size makes home grown IT difficult because it is simply too hard, and too costly, to meet all the B2B finance needs of their enterprise customers. The answer, of course, is deeper integration to third party software systems like SAP, Oracle, JDA and the growing set of fintech providers br...

"Digital cash" has been a dream of the internet age for, well, almost the entire internet age. That goal requires instant payment settlement. It's more than just sending a message that a payment has happened; it means the money has actually moved. In this wide ranging conversation with Laurence Cooke, founder and CEO of nanopay , he discusses the platform his firm has built to move value between p...

Episode 69 is all about how the PCI Security Standards Council is responding to changes in security technology and how it is expanding its role and technology coverage across important new geographies. If payment security is on your screen, join Glenbrook's George Peabody , partner and host of Payments on Fire , and Troy Leach, CTO for the PCI Security Standards Council as they discuss standards u...

Digital identity is a crisp sounding term that belies a complex layer of concepts. There is identity proofing. Identify verification. Identity assurance. Each addresses one element of the many questioned raised by digital identity. How does a bank really know the digital presence at its banking portal is associated with the accountholder? How can you, as an individual, release only the amount of d...

Voice is the natural user interface and the robots are coming to take it on. Enabled by high volume consumer devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple's Siri and powered by artificial intelligence engines like Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, we are headed toward making voice-enabled commerce and payments a common experience. Russ Jones is Glenbrook 's "tech whisperer," an ex...

Payment innovation runs at multiple speeds. Changes in how a payment is initiated happen almost every day. Payments infrastructure change is a lot slower. But it's happening. Nudged forward by the Federal Reserve's Faster Payment Task Force, we are seeing the launch of the first entirely new payment system in decades. Called Real Time Payments (RTP) the new system switched its first real-time paym...

Once upon a time, text messaging systems didn't interoperate. But when they did, usage skyrocketed. Many of the world's mobile money payment systems still operate within that old "walled garden" model, limiting the ability of citizens in areas like Southern Africa to send money home to family, pay utility bills, and, most important, enjoy the benefits of an national economy that is payments enable...

The intersection of new tech, faster payments capabilities, and forward looking regulation is enabling significant innovation in B2B, and consumer, payment services in the UK and EU. Join Glenbrook's George Peabody and Myles Stephenson, CEO of business payments platform provider  Modulr , as they discuss how modern tech and updated rules have created opportunities for fintech service providers. Th...

Payments standards typically operate deep within a payment system, invisible to most of us. But before long a new standard for web browsers will touch us all. Known as the Payment Request API, it is one of the newer projects of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Supported by browser builders Mozilla, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more, this new API should simplify web payments for consumers and m...

If you're planning on attending Money/2020 in October, the Glenbrook team will be there in force. This short, not entirely serious, podcast previews the sessions we are leading there on two of the hottest topics around: B2B payments and the faster or real-time payments systems coming to the U.S.

We all know that the evolution of payments systems in the U.S. is accelerating. That's why Glenbrook has just published the third edition of our book, Payments Systems in the U.S. - Third Edition: A Guide for the Payments Professional , the definitive guide to the how and, in particular, the why of our multiple payments systems. The third edition addresses that evolution through updated examples a...

Interchange is fundamental to open look card system economics and a mystery to many, especially to merchants who must pay it but don't perceive any benefit from it. It's a non-optional component of what the merchant pays to accept cards. It's one element of the merchant discount fee. Despite the stubborn fact of it, there are ways for some merchants to make sure they pay as low a rate as possible....

B2B payments are huge. Taken together, these supply chain payments exceed the gross domestic product. But supply chain payments remain an imperfect art. While consumers pay for one purchase at a time, a B2B payment may cover multiple invoices, each with different commercial terms. Given the amount of data about the payment that's necessary to crisply communicate between a buyer's accounts payable...

The  Faster Payments Task Force  has brought together a broad constituency with the payments industry thoroughly represented. And thanks to participation by organizations like Consumers Union, the people who bring us  Consumer Reports , the voice of the consumer has been well represented in determining important evaluation criteria. Christina Tetreault , staff attorney at  Consumers Union , joins ...

Merchant adoption of EMV capability isn't a done deal in the U.S. Glenbrook's own estimates show that we're only halfway there. Few people have as much insight into merchant payment acceptance and the technology that enables it as Larry Godfrey of Global Payments ' Heartland Payments business. Take a listen to George and Larry's discussion as they cover: The EMV terminal transition The chargebacks...

Consumer billing payments get complicated in the healthcare space. Co-payments are bigger than ever as are the medical bills. Consumers need prompting to pay and even incentives to get those big bill onto a payment plan. With higher co-payments, smaller insurance payments, and so many patients having to deal with large medical bills, providers need services to take on the revenue management task....

The Internet of Things may be a hot topic but its security isn't hot at all. Up until recently, IoT device manufacturers and buyers haven't cared much about security, a disinterest that's led to over one hundred thousand surveillance cameras being hijacked by Mirai botnet malware. While cameras aren't making or accepting payments (yet) it's easy to imagine automobiles paying for tolls and fuel dir...

The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring us a tsunami of network-enabled devices, for consumer use as well as yet to be imagined industrial and commercial applications. Many of these devices will be payment enabled, many using card payment rails. Securing those billions of IoT devices is going to require techniques deployed by the mobile industry, the card industry, and other sectors. Cryptographic...

Bringing electronic payment capability to small merchants is a major hurdle for multiple developing economies. In this Payments on Fire podcast with Glenbrook co-founder Allen Weinberg and George Peabody, we discuss merchant enablement in markets reliant on 2G wireless and feature phones. We take a deeper look at India's payment evolution in particular. Allen's observations come from his recent wo...

Bringing payments and financial services to those of us with a tenuous connection to the banking system is the goal of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. FinLab , a joint effort by the CFSI and JPMorgan Chase, is a five year effort, now in its third year, that's using a competition for funding and business support to broaden American financial services options. When nearly half of Ameri...

Payments transactions generate plenty of useful data for merchants. But wrangling that data into informative shape gets challenging, especially when multiple acquirers, gateways, processors, or other service providers are used. Each one has a different approach to reporting and some are (much) better than others. Developing a consolidated view and, as important, reconciling financials from differe...

The term identity gets used a lot whenever internet payments and security are discussed. Knowing who we transact with is still the knotty problem. Strong authentication is required. Identity verification is required, too. A means of sharing the fruits of that work among the parties involved, especially those taking on risk, could save everyone a lot of cost and effort. That's the notion behind fed...

Want to know what it takes to to stay smart in payments? Take a listen to Russ Jones, the Partner in Charge of Glenbrook's Payments Boot Camp program. Russ gives a look behind the scenes, talks over the boot camp's evolution, and how it stays forward looking in what's become a fast changing industry. Over 13,000 payments professionals have experienced the Payments Boot Camp Russ talks about in thi...