Payments on Fire™

Blockchain. Is it the most revolutionary technology in value exchange ever or just the latest fintech buzzword enjoying its peak on the hype cycle? Or both? These young techniques are undergoing swift evolution, going from bitcoin and money transfer into new use cases such as identity management. There’s still truth in the cartoon’s joke that, online, no one knows you’re a dog. The challenge goes...

Anyone even vaguely conscious during Sunday afternoon football games has seen adverts for Visa Checkout, that shopping cart checkout assistant the card network is encouraging everyone—cardholders, issuers, and merchants—to adopt. Visa is not alone. MasterCard’s MasterPass and American Express Checkout are similar product offerings all meant to add convenience and security to the merchant’s checkou...

Interchange galvanizes the attention of regulators around the world like iron filings to a magnet. Everyone in card payments watches their moves closely because of its economic impact on merchants, card networks, acquirers and, in theory, consumer pricing. European regulators are among the most recent to weigh in. Based on the EU’s Multilateral Interchange Fee legislation, effective December 9, in...

Sending money in real-time is a capability that is growing around the world. “All bank” systems in the UK and Mexico are thriving. Mobile money services like M-Pesa are changing economies and individual lives in developing countries. But in the US, “things are complicated.” We have a crowded landscape in the US without, as in many global markets, a clear mandate from a regulator. In this Payments...

Since the first promise to pay was made, knowing who you’re dealing with has been a requirement. Authenticating the identity of a trading partner - a customer, an accountholder, a business or even a computer - is a burden that falls on the one extending trust because the giver takes on the transaction risk. In online and mobile transactions, the job of authentication has fallen on the password’s s...

With the EMV liability shift only days away, consumers and merchants are facing any number of changes in the point of sale experience. Unlike some other countries where the EMV change-over took place on a single day, the US EMV transition is going to be a long one, too. Not every issue is ironed out either. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Philip Andreae , VP, Field Marketing North America at O...

3D Secure, the protocol that connects ecommerce merchants to the cardholder’s issuer, has had a rough go. But after ten years, smarter application of the tool and, in particular, risk-based usage makes it more attractive to both issuers and merchants. In this conversation with Mike Roche, VP of Consumer Authentication at Cardinal Commerce, we take a deep dive into 3D Secure, its implementation and...

The Internet’s designers quickly realized that no one’s very good at remembering IP address numbers. Unless you type the same number over and over again (and I did when I ran an ISP) a human readable version is a lot easier. That’s what the domain name system or DNS is all about, connecting human readable names to specific IP addresses.  You can imagine then that Bitcoin, with its long alphanumeri...

Every payment pro in the US is also a shopper and we all know that the largest retailers are poised to support EMV. Nearly all have EMV capable hardware. A few have turned it on. Most are waiting for the October liability shift so the temporary pain and awkwardness of clerk and consumer confusion is spread across everyone.    But what about the small and medium business (SMB) market? Mike English,...

Host card emulation ( HCE ) was invented back in 2012. It was supposed to do for NFC on Android what Apple Pay has done for NFC in the iOS ecosystem. But it’s taken longer, a lot longer, for a robust Android-based NFC capability to get deployed. In this conversation with HCE inventor Doug Yeager, CEO of SimplyTapp , we review how HCE works, what it requires, and take a look at why it’s taken so lo...

The domain of point of sale (POS) has three legs to its security stool: EMV, point to point encryption, and card number tokenization. Card not present (CNP) merchants and issuers have the more challenging task of assembling fraud mitigation tools on their own. The networks have had, until EMVCo’s move into payment card tokenization, not much more than 3D Secure to offer. Merchants and card issuers...

Tokenization is, and will continue to be, a hot topic in payments. After all, it's what powers Apple Pay. Last week I chaired the Mobile Payment Innovation Summit  where tokenization was a recurring theme. I asked Glenbrook  partner Russ Jones  to return for an update, to help us dig deeper into what’s happened over the six months and to consider where tokenization is going. He’s bullish on the ca...

We all know EMV is coming to the U.S and that it will take years to build a complete EMV security perimeter. But the work starts with issuers sending out chip cards to their customers. Take a listen to this conversation with Chase’s Dina DeMerell, Director, Card Services Chip Security, to hear how Chase is deploying EMV credit, debit, prepaid and co-branded card products. She wasn’t kidding about...

Decisions about point of sale transactions are largely made using card data alone but in e-commerce the merchant has to use a rich mix of data sources to manage fraud. The merchant is, after all, liable for both the transaction as well as the goods or services lost due to fraud. E-commerce merchants use publicly sourced data from firms like Whitepages to perform both automated and manual reviews....

This week's CNP Expo in Orlando brought together some 1,000 fraud technology vendors, processors, merchants, commerce-focused entrepreneurs and others to discuss the arrival of EMV in the US, global payments, and more. We took the opportunity to speak with two enterprise focused firms, Nu Data Security and CardConnect. We also spoke with the founder of mobile shopping service SelfPay. Nothing like...

Paying invoices and moving funds aross borders for small and medium business (SMB) is expensive and full of uncertainties. How much does the recipient actually get once the transaction is finished? (Hint: it's not always what was sent.)  How long does it take a San Francisco firm to pay an invoice to a contractor in Berlin or Hyderabad? (Hint: it's hard to know exactly when it gets there). Since t...

EMV and its moving parts presents a far more complex payments method for merchants, ISVs, payment processors, and financial institutions than the good old magstripe. It continues to have ramifications throughout the payments ecosystem.  As Executive Director of the Smart Card Alliance  and director of the EMV Migration Forum, Randy Vanderhoof has shepherded a sometimes fractious payments industry...

It’s always intriguing to watch how a good idea evolves into new areas. Such evolution often happens when designers find new applications for their ideas. Brian Merritt and Ryan Hildebrand were part of the early team at Simple that was subsequently sold to BBVA. In mid-February, they announced the formation of Seed , a Y Combinator firm, designed to bring small business banking into the mobile and...

Tablet-based ePOS cash registers are growing in popularity and capability. A boon to smaller retailers who have been laggards in store automation. But without technical support staff on hand, solving issues when they arrive, never mind securing systems, is an expensive proposition. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and payments industry veteran Chip Kahn, founder of Boomtown, a marketplace for merch...

Aaron Press of Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions joins Glenbrook's George Peabody for a discussion on mobile fraud trends based on the firm's True Cost of Fraud mCommerce report. While the mobile channel presents fraud and risk professionals with a wide variety of tools to mitigate losses, the report concludes that the mobile channel represents a disproportionately large loss vector. In this Payments on...

Glenbrook's Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody talk with CBW Bank's Suresh Ramamurthi on payment innovation, risk management, and international remittances. Suresh is also founder of Yantra Financial Technologies . He and his wife were featured in this  NY Times Dealbook article last month.

Glenbrook's George Peabody  discusses Bitcoin and blockchain evolution with Sean Safahi, co-founder and CEO of Bold Financial Technologies , a provider of math-based currency services to the banking industry. Applications that make use of the bitcoin blockchain and consensus-based approaches are proliferating. We discuss these including the newly launched Stellar , a non-profit infrastructure prov...

In this interview with Glenbrook's founding partner Carol Coye Benson, we discuss the prospects for a faster payments system in the US. Responding to the October 22 announcement  by The Clearing House, Carol expresses her caution and hope for ways to accelerate replacement of today's system for credit push payments.   

Realtime, consumer-facing authorization of card payment transactions has been available for some time but few of us have it offered to us by our issuers. Today, there's a number of technology providers selling truly realtime notifications and two-way approval requests based on the live authorization stream. Glenbrook's Russ Jones takes us through what's on offer while George gets grumpy over what...

Join George Peabody in a conversation with Stockpile's Dan Schatt on virtual banking, innovation, and the future of PayPal.  Dan is former GM of Financial Innovations at PayPal and the author of Virtual Banking: A Guide to Innovation and Partnering , a new book that includes a chapter on Bitcoin and math-based currencies by Glenbrook's George Peabody.  We also discuss Stockpile's innovative approa...