Payments on Fire™

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...

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 po...

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.  

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 rap...

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...

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 momen...

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.

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 so...

"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 t...