Payments on Fire™

In this episode, Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones join Yvette Bohanan to discuss Glenbrook's focus on payments education and share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34,000 (and counting) payments geeks. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes insights from their workshop experiences and highlights from the latest offering, On-Demand Learning, as Glenbr...

Booshan Rengachari, CEO of Finzly, joins Glenbrook's Elizabeth McQuerry and Simon Skinner to discuss how software, fast payments, and open banking are reshaping the banking industry and the way we think about financial services. Tune in as they cover the challenges of modernizing legacy banking systems, the rise of fast payments, and the potential of open banking to integrate banking services into...

The Glenbrook partners reflect on key trends and challenges in the payments industry that shaped 2024 - from generative AI, open banking, the evolving regulatory landscape, and the rise of fast payment systems worldwide. And you can't get the Glenbrook team in a "room" without discussing ongoing fraud implications, orchestration in merchant payments, and the progress of tokenization. Tune in to he...

Real end-to-end testing requires real-world transactions. Sometimes that's not too difficult to do if you are implementing payments in your own country. But step outside your border, and it gets a bit harder.  People new to payments turn to logical solutions when faced with this problem. Can you call the acquirer? Won't they have test accounts for us to use? (Probably not.) Can't we just drip a fe...

Payments and treasury are two sides of the same coin. Payments teams are responsible for the customer journey - payments into a company and sometimes disbursements to sellers, app developers, content creators, or vendors. Their role usually includes working with banks and other providers to ensure money moves into and out of the company's accounts correctly and efficiently.  Treasurers are respons...

Yvette Bohanan and Russ Jones celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the announcement of Apple Pay by reflecting on its origins, challenges, and successes. The episode highlights key features like tokenization, encryption, and biometric authentication, emphasizing Apple Pay's focus on security, privacy, and convenience. Tune in to take a look back at Apple Pay's significant impact on the payments in...

One of the existential challenges remaining in payments is the need to accurately authorize transactions conducted online. While markets like the EU, UK and India have mandated strong customer authentication for online transactions, the U.S. is the largest market where such stepped-up authentication remains optional. Only a very small portion of eCommerce purchases utilize the 3-D Secure protocol...

While "paying into" a company comes with nuance and complexity, it's really nothing compared to what is involved when a business attempts to make an outgoing payment.  Most of us don't think very much about these "payouts". It's been the domain of ERP software for decades, often an asterisk mentioning "supported payments". Whether you are talking about B2B payments, expense reimbursements, or mass...

It's September 2024, and this month, we're focusing on business-to-business payments. B2B payments are difficult because so much information must be exchanged for them to process efficiently. But there's more to it than that. B2B payments are many things to many people - for finance teams, they are "payables"; for gig economy companies, they are "payouts"; for providers, like insurance companies,...

The introduction of real-time payments in the U.S. market has been unfolding for several years now, but it seemed to pick up momentum in the last year as FedNow came to market. We now have over 1,000 banks live with real-time payments (at least for receiving) and a solid majority of transaction accounts are now reachable via FedNow, The Clearing House's RTP system, or both. We wanted to understand...

Sometimes an episode sticks with me. It just keeps coming back in different ways. Reading an article, having a conversation, even watching TV can make me stop and reflect on a recording. This is exactly what has been happening since we sat down with Dr. David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to talk about fraud. As always, we covered a lot of ground in this episode. As you might expect...

In this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire, Glenbrook's Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Russ Jones discuss Mastercard's bold June announcement to eliminate manual card number entry for eCommerce transactions in Europe by 2030, and explore the challenges and necessary steps to achieve this goal. The conversation centers around three core components from the announcement: tokenization,...

Authentication and identification are top of mind for payments professionals battling fraud these days. We've made progress over the past two decades in managing payments risk in the digital era, but fraud continues to evolve and often seems to be one or several steps ahead. The classic cat-and-mouse game has moved to a point where "Are you really you?" and "Should you have access to this account?...

As scams, ransomware, account takeovers, and old-fashioned data breaches persist in our personal and business lives, we are all pondering how to get ahead in the cat-and-mouse game that global fraud rings seemingly have mastered. With this episode, we're setting the stage for a series of discussions on authentication and identity, the critical components of tackling this pervasive issue. We're emb...

For decades, technology, regulations, and dissatisfaction with the status quo have formed a powerful triad, driving payments innovation. This triad is fueled by investors and innovators seeking to disrupt and legislators and agencies seeking to enforce compliance, increase transparency, and enhance fairness. In this episode, John Pitts, Head of Policy at Plaid, sat down with Yvette Bohanan to disc...

In this episode, we fan the flames to get Glenbrook's hot takes on the proposed Capital One acquisition of Discover. Now that the dust has settled a bit on the February announcement, and while we wait with bated breath to see if the regulators will sign off on this deal, we wanted to debate the potential winners and losers - and possible outcomes -  of an acquisition. We spend some time discussing...

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Glenbrook Managing Partner Bryan Derman and guests Michele Alt and Adam Shapiro, Partners at the Klaros Group. The result is a lively discussion about regulators and the impact of the current regulatory environment on banks and fintechs, a topic of utmost relevance in today's rapidly evolving industry landscape. The economy and all that is at play durin...

The process of accepting payments is a labyrinth of complexity, and payment service providers are the guiding lights that help merchants navigate this maze. They assist in deciding which payments to accept, how to connect to networks, and, most crucially, how to optimize revenues and reduce risk. But what about the providers themselves? Is their work getting more or less complicated? We sat down w...

In Episode 231 , Samantha Gordon and Simon Skinner discussed the orchestration framework they developed to help our clients decipher a somewhat overused term in the industry. It was a great discussion, and if you missed it, I recommend you give it a listen. We covered a lot of ground in that episode that sets up this conversation with John Lunn , CEO and Founder of Gr4vy . While preparing for this...

Glenbrook's Russ Jones often chats with professionals working for companies inside the payments industry who are providing payments and services to end users such as businesses, enterprises, governments, and individuals. Or they may be working at an enterprise, a merchant, or a biller. And they're all trying to figure out how to save money in payments. In this episode, Russ joins Yvette to talk th...

Acquired by Mastercard in 2017, the UK's Vocalink manages the UK's Bacs payment system, ATM LINK switching platform, and the Faster Payments System, FPS. To make this more tangible, consider these statistics: Vocalink processes over 90% of UK salaries, more than 70% of household bills, 98% of state benefits, and powers 60,000 ATMs.  Vocalink's influence goes beyond the UK, with technology that pow...

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 pa...

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...

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,...

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 painfu...