Payments On Fire

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.

Payments on Fire Episode 21, originally aired: June 15, 2015 Network tokenization - the promised land of payments. Like most promised lands, the journey there is epic and, well, hard. One question we hear from our clients, workshop participants, and the folks in our Merchant Round Table is: Are we there yet? We dug into our vault to understand the journey - where we started and how far we’ve come. We found Episode 21, when George Peabody and Russ Jones discussed network tokenization (aka issuer tokenization, aka EMV tokenization). This conversation is an excellent episode to get the history, essential workings, and context for an important, if not long in the tooth, technology reshaping how payment credentials are propagated and managed in our digital era. Yvette will be catching up with Russ and Chris Uriarte to discuss recent developments in network tokenization on an upcoming podcast - and try to decide when we’ll arrive at our destination.

While payment facilitation has opened up a new segment of service providers within the payments industry, embedded finance is opening up the world of payments to every company. The allure of embedded finance is rooted in the deepening of the customer relationship through offering meaningful financial products. This deeper relationship comes in the form of increased customer loyalty - or “stickiness” - and new revenue streams accretive to the company’s core business. This is all well and good, but payments and financial products are regulated, complex, and often require support at the critical moment of the transaction or afterward. How is customer support evolving to meet the needs of companies and customers in the world of embedded finance? How should providers be thinking about customer support?  In this episode, Yvette sits down with Ashley Isenberg, VP of Revenue and Strategic Partnerships at Finix and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond to explore the ongoing evolution of customer support in the payments industry.  

With all its associated technologies (neural networks, symbolic reasoning, search algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, expert systems, and more), AI has been evolving in universities, the government, and corporations for decades. But only those with a keen interest in this technology have been paying close attention to its progress. Meanwhile, a chatbot helped you when you contacted support. Or you used Alexa or Siri to answer a question, play some music, turn on your lights, buy something online, pay your bills, or tell a joke. In our lives, we have caught glimpses of AI’s potential but no clear line of sight as to how powerful the underpinning technologies have become or how quickly they are evolving. With the unveiling of ChatGPT and similar tools, we are now face to face with the AI era. In his book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman says, "Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability

Payments on Fire Episode 1, originally aired: September 7, 2014 Innovation in the payments industry is a funny thing. Sometimes payments lead. Sometimes technology leads. Increasingly around the world, regulators lead. In preparing for an upcoming podcast on AI, Yvette thought about Glenbrook’s first Payments on Fire podcast episode - in 2014 - on Bitcoin. So we’re pulling it from the vault to share.   If you have ever wanted to be a fly on the wall while industry thought leaders contemplated the implications of something new, here’s your chance. This is eavesdropping at its best - and a great reminder that innovation and disruption are not just about technical feasibility.  

In Part 2, Yvette Bohanan continues the conversation from Episode 206 with the commercial practice team at Glenbrook. We cover some new topic areas, including banks, risk and fraudsters, and the investment community in this macroeconomic environment. Listen in to see what we're watching, where we might see some blind spots, or where the next set of curveballs will be coming as we get into the back half of 2023. 

Russ Jones chats with Yvette Bohanan about Glenbrook's new Payments Boot Camp Intensive workshop. Listen in to hear more details including agenda highlights, workshop format, and who should attend. Register for any session before July 10 to automatically receive a 10% discount!

Each month, Justin Pituch recaps the news that got Glenbrook talking in his Payments Post. In May, he observed a burst of news highlighting new technology reshaping how American consumers make purchases and verify their identity. At the same time, other articles underscored how American consumers are struggling to fulfill financial obligations against the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty. In this Fanning the Flames episode, Justin and Yvette Bohanan consider these forces and potential implications for the future of payments.

Some people know Glenbrook for our Payments Boot Camp workshops, some know us for our book - Payment Systems in the US - while others know us for this podcast. Interestingly, while we do all of those things, we are, in fact, a consulting firm. A consulting firm that believes educating industry professionals is a great way to make the industry stronger. Our consulting practice gives us a front-row seat to stakeholders across the value chain. Whether they are in start-ups or central banks, we hear what’s on their minds every day and have the opportunity to help them tackle challenges, identify growth opportunities, and instigate change. In this episode, Yvette Bohanan sits down with Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Drew Edmond to take stock of payment industry trends as we reach the halfway point of 2023, to hear their perspectives on what’s hot, what’s not, and what are they watching as we venture into the second half of the year.  

In payments, as it is in life, a simple question is often wrapped in complexity. The complexity of the payments acceptance landscape, with an increasing number of stakeholders and technology providers, changing regulations and rules, and Issuers implementing new authentication and authorization mechanisms - any one or a combination of these could lead to major and minor impacts to the operational and financial performance of a business. And while this has been the case for several decades, we find ourselves in a macroeconomic environment that requires us to find operational efficiencies, which places the payments team under increasing pressure to maximize the number of successful payments, lower the cost of accepting payments, and support customer acquisition to drive incremental revenue. Long story short, these “simple questions” are being asked more often and at higher organizational levels. Why are simple questions hard to answer? Yvette Bohanan talks with Klas Bäck, Founder and CEO of Pagos Solutions, and

In the US, fast payments discussions have centered around person-to-person, business-to-business, bill payment, and digital wallet funding in/out scenarios. In 2022, RTP® processed $72B, the majority of this volume communing from PayPal and Venmo funding activity. Zelle has reached a highly respectable $629B in person-to-person payments, traversing into “person-to-sole proprietor” territory. ACH, the workhorse of bulk payments is, as we say “hotter than ever” with Same Day ACH seeing an 86% year-over-year increase growing from $943B to $1.758B annual volume. But what about consumer-to-business purchases? Is there an opportunity for the US to see momentum in open banking and fast payments move into the commerce domain as they are in India, Brazil, and other countries? What will it take - and are we ready - to “pay by bank”? Yvette Bohanan welcomes Eric Shoykhet, CEO & Co-Founder of Link Financial Technologies, to this episode to share his thoughts on the topic.

A 2022 report from the CFPB titled Buy Now, Pay Later: Market trends and consumer impacts noted that from 2019 to 2021, the dollar volume of BNPL originations through five lenders surveyed grew by 1,092 percent, from $2 billion to $24.2 billion. BNPL adoption continues, not just in the US but globally, making it one of the most watched payment methods in the world.  BNPL’s rapid ascent has raised questions about its use: Who is choosing to use BNPL? Is it helpful or harmful to consumers’ credit and overall financial well-being? Does it improve financial inclusion? Is it displacing other forms of payment at checkout? A quick online search leads to mixed data points and inconsistent findings, often based on modest sample sizes and extrapolations. To answer these questions, we sat down with Kristin Carlson, Global Products and Analytics Data Scientist, and Zach Tondre, Director of Credit Risk Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who conducted a longitudinal study to obtain insight into these and other q

In this episode, we explore the intersection of three significant payment trends: helping small businesses modernize their payment acceptance options, embedded finance, and the consumer lending phenomenon known as  Buy Now, Pay Later. We look at the potential market - asking ourselves if there is demand from small businesses and consumers. Then we unpack the opportunity using our BNPL “flywheel” to examine the critical success factors for any BNPL solution. Yvette Bohanan and Debbie Bartoo are joined by Bobby Tzekin, Founder and CEO of Wisetack (and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp alumnus) to examine how technology, consumer and small business demand, and banking are opening up a very large market in the BNPL space - one that has a lot of potential and a lot of nuance.

In this episode, we are taking a closer look at the relationship underpinning much fintech innovation in payments – the fintech, bank, and BaaS trilogy. These 3-way partnerships have spurred innovation, increased access to financial services, and created offerings that appeal to a broad range of businesses and consumers. But in the context of these 3-way partnerships, new and existing risks abound, and relationships between counterparties are not well-established – making this a perfect haven for bad actors. Join us as we explore the current state of payments risk management across these alliances, and discuss the opportunities to make this new landscape safe, strong, and sustainable.  

There are a lot of headlines in the payments world. Payments News is Glenbrook’s curated news feed of the headlines that matter most every day, but we’ll readily acknowledge that it can be a lot to digest. That’s why we’ve introduced Payments Post, a month-end roundup of the news items that got us talking as a team along with some commentary about why we think they’re particularly important to the direction of the industry. Glenbrook’s Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode to discuss the implications of the top April headlines, which were all related to account-to-account (A2A) payments.