Payments on Fire™

Payment authorization rates are a theme we return to regularly on Payments on Fire® because they matter so much to merchants, issues, and the payment providers in between. If a big issuer declines more transactions than its peers, the merchant and the issuer, in fact, leave money on the table. The merchant loses sales. The issuer loses interchange revenue. In this episode, we speak with Stripe 's...

In Glenbrook's Payments Boot Camp® and in our payments consulting work, we use our Domains of Payments framework to subdivide the major use cases and payment contexts into a half dozen categories or domains. The Remote Domain contains cross-border e-commerce, a particularly challenging use case where the buyer and seller are separated by distance and, in the case of cards, credentials are presente...

In this special episode of Payments on Fire®, Glenbrook partner Elizabeth McQuerry , partner in charge of Glenbrook's Global payments consulting practice, leads a conversation on the development and adoption of realtime payments in developing markets. Joining Elizabeth are Miller Abel, Deputy Director, Principal Technologist at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gene Neyer, Executive Advisor to I...

The "supermarket" days of financial institutions providing all of our financial services and holding all of our accounts are long over. Brokerages, insurance companies, and the expanding array of fintechs compete to hold, manage, or organize our assets. With so many custodians of our financial data, it can be difficult for an individual to generate a complete picture of her finances. That's been a...

Welcome to Payments on Fire® and to our third, now annual, discussion with Steve Ledford, SVP Products and Strategy at The Clearing House, and the leader of his company's Real Time Payment Network initiative. As in prior conversations, Steve and George discuss the growth of the RTP Network both in terms of transactions and dollar volume as well as an important metric, the growth in the number of f...

Be Safe. Be Well. Help Out. This is our era's unprecedented event. I hope you're staying safe, your family is all well, and you've got what you need for what looks to be a pretty long time. On the upside, I've seen and experienced people helping one another like never before. That gives me confidence we'll be able to mitigate COVID-19's impact on our healthcare system - and on all of us. The downs...

Sometimes events delay things. Other times, they hasten them. At Glenbrook, the corona virus has sped us along a path we've been traveling for some time. The path is digital delivery of the Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp®. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Russ Jones, partner in charge of Glenbrook's education team, talks with George about two major changes in our payments education program. 1. Dig...

Fraudster innovation is a constant. As the defenders of payment transactions thwart one fraud vector, these innovators, playing offense, switch tactics. Today, the problem of knowing who you are, that you are who you say you are, in the digital domain demands stronger authentication techniques. Many of those rely on the attributes, the data, provided by the user or by the applicants in the case of...

On Payments on Fire® we've talked with gateway operators, processors, tokenization specialists, fraud management firms, and others - all providers who help payment acceptors handle their payments. The range of services and business value they deliver varies a lot. Some providers do everything. Others, like Spreedly , the subject of this Payments on Fire® podcast, focus on a narrower set of functio...

In this Payments on Fire® podcast, we examine the role of a payment service offered through a commerce solution targeted at the small and medium business (SMB) market. To do that, we talk with Nan Siler, Head of Payments Strategy and Operations, at Kabbage. The small and medium business market is important to both the national and local economies. It's big. According to the U.S. Small Business Adm...

As our lives shift online, our providers needs strong digital representations of each of us in order to make authentication and authorization decisions. Besides payment transactions, there are the diverse risks they must manage when, for example, we establish new credit relationships, add new payees to our online accounts, and move money in new ways. The providers of these capabilities—and often a...

The U.S. has just come off a record setting holiday shopping season with e-commerce sales rising over 18%. While the numbers aren't in yet, there's no doubt the fraudsters also had a record year. There are so many ways to defraud consumers, merchants, and financial institutions. At Glenbrook, we are optimistic about our longer term ability to deter, prevent, and detect fraud. Our kit is getting be...

Deployment of "clean sheet of paper" payment systems is a once in a generation event. In over 50 countries, new account-to-account push payment systems are either in full scale operation, implementation, or fully committed planning stages. The U.S., for example, has the RTP Network in operation and, in a few years, the FedNow system will be online. This is hard, serious work. Technology decisions...

If you thought bitcoin was dead as a payments system, take a listen to George and Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of the Bitcoin Association , as they discuss Bitcoin SV, a new version of bitcoin that is a significant upgrade to the performance and capabilities of the original bitcoin protocol put into the world a decade ago.   From a payments perspective, bitcoin has failed. While successful as...

Join Jeff Brown, president of VPay , a firm specializing in insurance claims payments, and George Peabody of Glenbrook Partners in this deep dive discussion of how the work of claims processing is done and how he approaches B2B payments, compliance, and the value-added services needed by the company's customers. The B2B Domain We're all familiar with the card present POS domain, card not present R...

Digital disruption and financial inclusion are focus areas throughout the developing world and the topics are white hot in Colombia. Listen in as Hernando Rubio, CEO of Moviired, speaks with Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody about Movii and payment / financial inclusion ecosystem in Colombia. Financial Inclusion in Colombia Although one of the first countries in Latin America to make a big pol...

The merchant acquiring industry continues its large scale shift from a payments-led to an operations-led purchasing decision for the merchants it serves. Historically based on independent sales organizations (ISOs) and non-bank acquirers, the party that increasingly provides payment acceptance is the independent software vendor (ISV). This makes sense for a number of reasons: Software is Vertical...

Take a listen as George and Nick Starai, Chief Strategy Officer of NMI discuss the role of the independent payments gateway and its evolution as a technology and business enabler for today's providers of payment acceptance: ISOs, ISVs, and merchants.   A key technology and business partner for merchants and the first-line providers of payment services (think ISVs and ISOs) is the payment gateway....

Take a listen to Ian Drysdale of Zelis Payments and George as they discuss how complex the payments process is in the healthcare industry.    Near the peak of payments complexity and specificity is the healthcare industry. If you've ever looked at an explanation of benefits letter from a healthcare insurer, you've had a glimpse into the complexity of these payments. Multiple parties are paid a lot...

Need an early warning system for what payment system hackers are about to do? Then knowing what's happening on the dark net is imperative. In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George speaks with Aamna Zia, VP of Finance and Growth at Flare Systems , and David Hetu, its Chief Science Officer. Based in Montreal, Flare Systems operates a dark net monitoring system that brings intelligence to the Inf...

Listen to George and Jacques Soussana, General Secretary, of nexo Standards , an organization based in Europe with global goals to establish interoperability of hardware, software, and data across the point of sale and e-commerce domains. Interoperability in a Complex Ecosystem The payments industry is in a period of especially swift change. New methods of payment, new payment systems, new ways to...

A  Better Way, Please Last week I tried to connect my accounts at two different banks. Between account type mismatches (my bad), long account numbers, ACH micro-deposits, and balky websites, well, I'll confess I put a check in the mail as a "quicker" way of overcoming the electronic barriers. Snail mail. Really? That situation, and many more where speed matters, is exactly why the world is turning...

For a nanosecond, about seven years ago, I thought the payments industry was entering a steady state where change, while sure to be accelerated by technology, was going to settle down to the familiar sedate pace the payments industry had taken for decades. Hah! Payment industry evolution has leapt forward since then based on, yes, technology, but also new rules, regulations, business models, and c...

One of the privileges of using a card to make a payment is the ability to dispute that charge should something go wrong. Maybe you ordered one garden rake but got charged for two. Perhaps you ordered a sweater and, as my colleague Allen Weinberg puts it, "got shipped a box of rocks." Or you discover a charge that you didn't make on your card account and believe it's fraudulent. In all those cases,...

The global spread of digital payments gets a huge boost from giants like Google. Google's Google Pay is far more than just a wallet, and the subject of this Payments on Fire® episode with Steve Klebe. Steve heads Google's Processor and Partnerships business and has terrific experience in our industry, working with payment gateway CyberSource, payment security firm RSA, and carrier billing firm Bil...