Payments on Fire™

In this Payments on Fire® George and Scott Giordano, VP and Sr. Counsel, Privacy and Compliance at data privacy management firm Spirion , talk about what can and has gone wrong, the high cost of sanctions for failure, and how to reduce the risks attendant with the handling of personal data.   Privacy. It's a huge issue. Many of us are concerned as individuals with how our personal data - our perso...

In this episode, George speaks with Rafael Lourenco, EVP and Partner of fraud management provider ClearSale . Rafael returns to Payments on Fire® to address COVID's impact including new online threats and the consumer behavior changes that challenge the customer checkout experience and fraud detection.   COVID-19 has contorted how merchants do business into new shapes. COVID-19 is forcing some mer...

Take a listen to Rapyd 's Eric Rosenthal and Glenbrook 's George Peabody as they discuss Rapyd's swift global expansion, its ability to quickly build new capabilities, and the firm's cloud-based tech stack. It uses its "white label PayPal" model to payment-enable a wide range of companies and use cases. Programming Payments Has Been Hard Among the many evolutions in the payments industry over the...

The transition away from paper to an all digital payments world has been underway for decades. But in the last few years the pace has accelerated. Global tech availability and focused development talent is letting software eat the payments world. Other enablers include business models such as payments facilitation and the focus on commerce, not just payments, for merchants. COVID-19 has simply add...

Take a listen to Craig McDonald, Chief Business Officer of Trustly and George as they discuss how Trustly makes its proposition possible. While Trustly is ramping up its U.S. presence, it does have timing on its side. In this pandemic-constrained age, merchants will be looking for lower cost payments and certainty. Trustly appears to have attributes to meet those concerns.   In our payments educat...

This illuminating Payments on Fire® episode takes a deep look at a very new Brazilian payments platform called Conta Zap (Zap Account in English) and how a group of community minded people came together with Conta Zap to provide basic income to economically displaced Brazilians during the COVID-19 outbreak. The story illustrates how the combination of entrepreneurial thinking, technology, and righ...

There's no clearer indicator of COVID-19's economic impact than payment metrics. In this Payments on Fire® episode, we speak with Bryan Derman , Glenbrook's managing partner, and Glynn Frechette , SVP of PSCU's Advisors Plus division, in a discussion of PSCU's payment trends analysis. Glynn provides an exceptionally detailed view into the pain, and some real gains, that the pandemic has brought to...

It is super instructive to hear about payments evolution. So, it's time to take a trip. In this Payments on Fire® episode we speak with Charles Ifedi , one of the founders of Interswitch, one of the leading digital payments providers in Nigeria, and founder of customer engagement platform company eBanqo . We hear a lot - and deservedly so - about innovative fintech companies but we hear very littl...

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...