Payments on Fire

In this episode, Brant Peterson, Head of Enterprise Product, North America at Worldpay, joins Drew Edmond to talk about payment optimization through the perspective of a payment service provider. Worldpay is one of the world's largest global PSPs - it processed over 2.5 Trillion Dollars in 2024, which was made up of 50 Billion transactions. Tune in to hear their perspectives on payment optimization and solutions that PSPs can offer merchant customers to help them improve their approval rates.

With this episode, we are launching a series to explore the current state of global financial inclusion efforts from a payments perspective. Joanna Wisniecka joins Yvette Bohanan to chat with Michael Wiegand, Director of Inclusive Financial Systems at the Gates Foundation, about the work the Foundation is doing globally and the transformative impact of digital financial inclusion on economies and societies.

Spec co-founder and CEO Nate Kharrl joins Yvette Bohanan on Payments on Fire to dig into some of the tactics and tech that is enabling today's fraud schemes, and how GenAI is redefining the payments risk landscape.

Glenbrook partners Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Simon Skinner jump on a special Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire to give a first take on the  Global Payments acquisition of Worldpay. Tune in to hear their strategic perspective on the deal.

David Maimon, head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, joins Yvette Bohanan for another episode to raise awareness about different fraud tactics and their impacts.  In this conversation, Yvette and David explore the intricacies and implications of Credit Profile Numbers (CPNs) and synthetic identity fraud, as well as  “zombie debt” and assumed identity fraud.  Listen in to hear the implications of these fraud schemes and how industry professionals can get ahead of them.  

“Payments Performance Optimization” is a pretty broad term, and it might mean different things to different people.  In a series of Payments on Fire episodes this year, Glenbrook's Drew Edmond will be talking to guests who are approaching payments optimization from a variety of different angles, with a focus on primarily online, card not present merchants.  At the end of the day, a merchant wants the maximum number of good transactions to be authorized successfully. It sounds so simple. But is anything in payments really simple? In this episode, Oban MacTavish, CEO and Co-founder of Spade, joins Drew to explore this issue by focusing on merchant data, and how issuers make decisions about card transactions.  

As legal and regulatory restrictions have become relaxed in recent years, we've been noting the increasing prevalence of surcharges on payment cards here in the U.S.  Perhaps it was inevitable that the practice would become more commonplace in our market, which is known around the world for relatively high rates of card interchange and a relatively light touch in financial services regulation. Surcharging is a tricky issue with a lot of different stakeholder perspectives to consider. In this episode, Emily Tsitrian, co-founder of Yeeld, joins Bryan Derman and Drew Edmond to share  industry insights on this emerging practice and how businesses can best implement surcharging while staying compliant.

In 2024, to our great delight, we had a conversation with David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink. We're fortunate to welcome David back for a quarterly series this year to check in on payments fraud writ large - to better understand what's happening and why. Listen in to this episode as Yvette and David discuss the evolution and resurgence of check fraud, the increasing sophistication of fraud rings targeting banks and the government, and the adaptation of new technologies, including Generative AI, for criminal activity.

In this episode, Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward, joins Glenbrook's Bryan Derman to share insights on the evolving partner banking space, the importance of risk and compliance frameworks, and Pathward's mission of financial inclusion. Tune in as they also discuss potential policy and regulatory changes due to implications of major discrepancies in the banking-as-a-service arrangement between fintech platform Synapse and its banking partners. 

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 Glenbrook continues to evolve payments education with the changing industry landscape.

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 everyday life. The episode also explores fraud prevention in fast payment systems and the evolving role of banks amidst competition from fintech companies.

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 hear insights from our industry experts on these themes and more as we wrap up the year and look towards 2025.

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 few transactions through with a few live customers to see how it goes? (Sure, but you may wait a long time to run through all the scenarios you would like to see - and there usually isn't patience for that in a launch environment.) It's tough, but don't be discouraged. Mercifully, a subspeciality of payment providers has set out to solve this problem. And that is the focus of this episode. Steve Semelsberger, CEO of Testlio, joins Yvette Bohanan and Drew Edmond to discuss the evolution of quality management alongside payments testing.  

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 responsible for managing cash, ensuring the efficient flow of funds, and ensuring that things like currency conversion are not eroding margins. Fintechs often have those goals and are usually searching for a bank sponsor who understands what they are trying to build.  Debopama Sen, Head of Payments at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, joins us for this episode to explore how treasury and payments professionals can collaborate on opportunities presented by the evolving payments landscape.   

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 industry and a look forward to its continued expansion.

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 due to lingering concerns about imposing friction and delay on a consumer base that thrives on convenience and fully understands its chargeback rights. The Payments Performance team at Stripe recently published a blog post noting that in their controlled testing of 3-D Secure, the impact on approval rates was negative compared to running similar transactions without additional authentication. We were surprised by those results and wondered what the card issuing community would make of that counter-intuitive finding. In this episode of Payments on Fire, we decided to get both sides of the story from two good friends of Glenbrook. Amandeep Batra from Stripe joined us to provide the merchant perspective; Dewald Nolte of Entersekt, a leader provider of 3-D Secure Access Control Server solutions joined us to offer the issuer perspective.

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 disbursements to gig workers, payouts started having a moment a few years ago.  Manish Vrishaketu, Chief Customer and Operations Officer at Tipalti, joins us for this episode to  dive into why payouts have been overlooked for so long, what makes them challenging to master, and what is happening that may make things better and easier for a “niche” specialization in our industry that happens to be incredibly important for every company on the planet.  

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, they are “claims payments.” The list goes on - and within each of these sub-categories, there are niggling nuances that are requirements for making these payments streamlined and affordable. For today's episode, we pulled a favorite from our vault - number 146, a discussion between George Peabody and Robin Gandhi. Since this aired in March of 2021, Robin has moved to a post as Chief Product Officer at Nium, and TripActions has rebranded to Navan. But the underlying ideas discussed regarding B2B are still important - and this idea of multi-player fintech and what it means for B2B payments is quite relevant.

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 whether we might be reaching the elusive “tipping point” for real-time payments in the U.S. and which players and what kind of use cases might be driving the growth. So, we turned to an old and respected friend of Glenbrook to share a perspective. In this episode, we go deep on the state of real-time with Dimitri Dadiomov. Dimitri is CEO at Modern Treasury, which gives him a birds-eye view of transaction trends as his company connects major corporations and leading-edge fintech platforms to a growing set of major banks in order to enable and streamline the origination of many money movement use cases.

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, we talked fraud trends. What you might not expect is a conversation, most enlightening, on the psychology of fraud and those who perpetrate it. Many thanks to David for sharing his insights on the dark web, on this podcast and regularly on LinkedIn. If you are not following him there, you should be. Last but not least, a shout out to Georgia State University and the work they are doing in their Evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group. Good stuff.

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, streamlined guest checkouts, and authentication via passkeys. Tune in to hear more about the mechanics of these technologies, their industry adoption, and implications for merchants, issuers, and cardholders.

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?” are the questions that are both increasingly critical and elusive to answer. In this episode, we take the long view, talking with Ori Eisen, CEO and Founder of Trusona. We reflect on what the payments industry has gotten right, the current challenges, and the future of authentication and identity. And, to pay attention to the here and now, we asked Ori to share his best practice tips for implementing passkeys.  

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 embarking on a journey of perspective gathering from some of the industry's leaders in risk management, authentication, and digital identity with this 2015 “from the vault” episode of Payments on Fire. Listen as Philip Andreae converses with George Peabody about the FIDO Alliance and its mission to bolster and streamline authentication. As you listen to this episode, consider the progress made since 2015 — have we come far enough, fast enough?

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 discuss open banking and its potential to change the finance industry's playing field: How consumers manage their personal financial lives, how financial service providers compete, and what this means for businesses. Listen to hear how, once again, the triad is at work reshaping the payments industry.

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 how this combination would impact some key stakeholder groups - networks, banks, processors, payment service providers, businesses, and merchants. Now that our thoughts are on the record, we're eagerly anticipating what we got right and what we missed if this intriguing acquisition comes to fruition.

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 during a major election year create a fascinating backdrop for this conversation.

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 with Trevor Nies (SVP, Global Head of Digital) who leads Adyen's digital payments organization, to explore this question as it relates to pay by bank. We discussed the pay by bank landscape in the US compared to other countries and why the US seems to be facing some headwinds. And, more importantly, what merchants should be thinking about when it comes to implementing pay by bank.

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 podcast, John observed that “every merchant has an orchestration platform; they just don't call it that.” That struck a chord as incredibly insightful. Merchants, at least those with the engineering resources to do so, have been adding software infrastructure to their operations to improve authorization rates, handle tokenization, route to different networks, and a host of other capabilities that simply do not come with the basic developer API toolkit. Those without engineering teams to help automate these capabilities are left to manual or ad hoc means to manage their operations. Either way, operational gaps often lead to lost revenues, increased costs, and sub-optimal customer experiences. Using the orchestration framework to guide our conversation, we discuss how orchestration is enabling merchants to do things differently—with more latitude and agency over their payments operations. We invite you to delve into this episode, which shifts the conversation from “What is orchestration?” to “Why is orchestration so powerful?” It's a valuable discussion you won't want to miss.

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 through 8 simple ideas about how you make money in payments.

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 powers fast payments infrastructure in countries such as the US, Thailand, Sweden, the Philippines, Peru, and Saudi Arabia - just to name a few. Vocalink's origin story, which began in 1998, spurred payments modernization efforts worldwide. For this episode, we sat down with Gregor Dobbie, former CEO of Vocalink, to discuss what we can learn from Vocalink's journey and what the future holds for core payment systems.

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 partnerships. This is a topic Steve is passionate about - and for good reasons. Partnerships - the successful ones - make this industry go around. The right partnerships can make the industry better, bring novel and differentiated offerings to the market, and make the payment transaction easier, more secure, and more valuable to consumers and businesses.  Steve has invested about half his career creating successful strategic partnerships for Verifone, CyberSource, Google, and more (frequently going out on a limb to do it), and he survives to tell his tale. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it.  

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 eschew false choices in favor of unexpected combinations, we met Glendy Kam, Chief Product Officer at Tassat. In this episode, Yvette enjoyed geeking out on payments innovation with Glendy and digging into how Tassat is creating an infrastructure enabling $1.4Tr in payments for commercial bank customers.  For all the participants who have been through a Glenbrook workshop and have asked about real-world use cases for distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies in payments, or are trying to figure out how to combine new and existing technologies to solve a problem, this episode is for you. Enjoy!  

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, with both the professionalization of payments and of fraud, and why she is now spearheading a certification program for the industry.  True to form, we also had to share our hot takes on topics such as “pay by bank”, and the looming US Credit Card Competition Act. We hope this inspires you to think about your personal career path in payments and your role as a leader in this industry. Be sure to check out Glenbrook's preparation course to help you demonstrate your command of payment and fraud knowledge and get ready to take the CPFPP exam.

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 painfully needed to improve a rather opaque transaction processing environment. Joining Yvette Bohanan are two Glenbrook colleagues, Simon Skinner and Samantha Gordon, who have been digging into orchestration solutions. They will be helping us define orchestration, offer a perspective on who should consider orchestration, and for those of you who do, a framework for thinking about orchestration.  

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 population of a country to consider - what does each segment of the population require to be able to use the currency? Then, there is the currency's role in supporting the economy. How will a new currency be protected from counterfeiting, and what controls will be required to prevent its misuse? How will it work with legacy payment systems and commercial banks? And how will it adhere to laws in place today and be prepared for tomorrow? Last but certainly not least, which technologies will enable all of these things and more? These were just some of the thoughts bubbling through my mind when I sat down with Jim Cunha, former EVP at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, to discuss the capstone project of his career - Project Hamilton - and the questions he and his team sought to answer as they embarked on their CBDC experiment. I hope you enjoy hearing Jim's insights on digitizing the world's reserve currency - I sure did.  

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 rapidly evolving payments world with all the headlines delivered each day to your inbox, subscribe to Payments News today.

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, Visa, and Mastercard came together to create a common specification for Chip and PIN so that any chip-enabled card could be read from any chip reader anywhere in the world if both complied with a common EMV specification. That significantly impacted Chip and PIN adoption - for merchants and consumers. Today, EMVCo supports seven EMV technologies. As a consumer, when you insert your card into a reader, “tap to pay,” or pay using Secure Remote Commerce, or as a merchant, accept payment through a mobile device or a QR code, support a tokenized card credential, or 3D Secure technology, you are benefiting from the work of EMVCo. In this episode, we talk with Oliver Manahan to understand how EMVCo fulfills its mission, catch up on its 2023 initiatives, and try to peek over the horizon to see what might be in store next for EMVCo.

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 moment”? What lessons can we glean from a conversation then that apply now? We've pulled Episode 16 from our vault to find out. We hope you enjoy this far-reaching discussion that moves from some EMV fundamentals to the implications of having a long tale of adoption, how consumer behavior and payment capabilities have to evolve in concert, and the reaction of fraudsters when things change in large, complex environments like the card system.  And stay tuned for our next episode where we welcome EMVCo to the show to see what they are up to these days and take a peak over the horizon. 

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 someone else's experience about what has worked or hasn't worked for them. In this episode, we go big - talking with two Google leaders, Luda Sokolov and Aarti Bharathan, who have been on a relentless mission to make the work of the Google teams supporting payments for billions of people worldwide more efficient, stable, and scalable.

“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 the industry.   

We get the opportunity to work with many different types of merchants in our Merchant Practice at Glenbrook: Global omnichannel retailers, marketplaces, commerce platforms, utilities, you name it. One of the major categories that we work with is subscription merchants, and they come with their own unique needs and perspectives.  Subscription merchants and merchants that have recurring payments as part of their business model rely on the ability to charge their customers on an ongoing basis. In this Fanning the Flames episode, Drew Edmond joins Yvette Bohanan to dive deep into an issue that has grown in importance with the continued growth of the subscription economy: involuntary churn.  Listen in to hear Drew shed light on this tricky and important topic for subscription merchants.  

Last week, we hosted the first Payments on Fire Live Stream event on the future of fast payments in the U.S. This episode highlights the panel conversation with Bernadette Ksepka, Federal Reserve Financial Services, Elena Whisler, The Clearing House, and Bryan Derman, Glenbrook Partners. 

Policy abuse, a form of first-party fraud, occurs when a customer - whether legitimate or a professional posing as a legitimate customer - manipulates a business's policies for financial gain.  In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Chris Uriarte sit down with Eyal Elazar, Head of Product Marketing at Riskified, to discuss policy abuse trends and the implications of consumers and professional criminals increasingly engaging in these schemes.  

Government leaders, policymakers, and a host of incumbent and new providers are focusing on cross-border payments. Innovating to increase transparency, lower cost, and make funds available in near real-time is showing up on agendas and roadmaps across the globe. Money and resources are being thrown at this problem from every possible angle. Yet friction points persist. Money does not get to beneficiaries with equal speed. Costs remain high and hidden. Compliance screening and due diligence create delays. Ryan Zagone, Head of Americas for Wise for Banks, and Glenbrook's Joanna Wisniecka join Yvette on this episode of Payments on Fire to raise a fundamental question: Is technology the whole answer? And if it isn't, what is?  

Globally, cross-border payments represent $156 trillion annually - roughly 25% of global GDP - and are projected to reach nearly $250 trillion by 2027. From a payments industry perspective, these transactions account for approximately $40 billion of $2.1 trillion in fee-generated revenues, excluding foreign exchange (2022 McKinsey Global Payments Report). These attention-grabbing numbers have been in the line of sight of regulators, innovators, and incumbents with increasing urgency. Improvements in domestic systems have matured in many countries, leading to conversations on how new fast payments systems can go cross-border. And, indeed, they are in several regions. Central Bank Digital Currencies are piloting cross-border payments, too.  In this episode, we're looking at the rapidly evolving space of cross-border payments with Glenbrook colleagues who have been traveling the globe working extensively with regulators, corporations, and governments on cross-border initiatives.  

The payment provider space is a complex and crowded field in the payments universe, particularly when it comes to supporting merchants. Independent Sales Organizations, Payment Facilitators, and Commerce Enablers all work to simplify payment acceptance for merchants, yet they each craft specific go-to-market strategies and differentiated value propositions. The diversity of these stakeholders underscores the diversity of merchants' payment acceptance requirements. In this episode, we had the opportunity to talk with Jared Isaacman, Founder and CEO of the Integrated Payments Provider, Shift4. Over the past 24 years, Shift4 has evolved by addressing the unique requirements of merchant categories and sub-categories in the increasingly complex Point of Sale (POS) environment. Jared's insights on how he bootstrapped the company to an IPO, successfully integrated multiple acquisitions, and often takes a problem-solving approach that highlights a different ethos than his peers makes this conversation soar.  

Each month, Justin Pituch recaps the news that got Glenbrook talking in his Payments Post. In a "double feature" for June and July, Justin covered two major themes: 1) organizations responding to greenfield opportunity in fast payments and 2) organizations recalibrating their post-COVID fintech bets. In this Fanning the Flames episode, Justin and Yvette Bohanan discuss these developments, as well as Justin's recent Payments Views posts on the pain of B2B and how ISO 20022 could help solve B2B data challenges. 

We find ourselves pondering many questions since the FedNow® launch, the third fast payments network introduced in the US. To gain perspective on the questions that have been asked and answered, and those that remain, we're giving a second listen to Episode 10 - when George Peabody sat down with Carol Coye Benson to discuss The Clearing House's announced plans for a multi-year effort that resulted in their fast payments network, RTP®. 

Issuer tokens, network tokens, EMV tokens - whatever you call them - continue to be a hot topic for merchants, payment service providers, issuing banks, processors, and the networks themselves. This “sleight of hand” substitution of a payment account number with an indistinguishable alternative carries with it a robust set of capabilities that have promised to reduce the value of breached payment account information, lower the cost of card replacement, and enable unique account numbers for the expanding universe of payment-enabled devices. In this episode, Chris Uriarte and Russ Jones discuss how tokens are implemented in the “card present” and “card not present” environments and how EMV tokens are becoming normalized in interchange tables, scheme fees, and provider services. As tokens move squarely into mainstream card processing, this conversation highlights important distinctions in network and provider implementations, fees, and regulations that should be on everyone's radar.