Payments On Fire

Curious about how fintechs solve client problems? Fintechs aren’t just about payments; they blend commerce enablement into their offerings The payment solution that solves the data problems - as well as moves the money - provides the most benefit to the customer Did you know that fintechs don’t do anything new? They just do it better. Take a listen to George and RoadSync’s CEO Robin Gregg as they take a deeper look into how fintech’s solve specific problems for specific industry segments. RoadSync provides payments and commerce services to the logistics and trucking industries. Come to the website for: Expanded show notes Video clip Podcast transcript The Payments on Fire® episode catalog The Glenbrook Education schedule

How do you secure bank to bank transfers between counter parties when the payment system itself lacks strong authentication? Can you balance the cost, speed, and security of transactions across multiple payment networks? In this episode of the Payments on Fire® fintech series, join Glenbrook’s Nicole Pinto and George Peabody as they speak with Eli Polanco, CEO and Founder of Nivelo. Her company offers risk scoring for ACH transactions to improve payment success rates and reduce fraudulent transactions. Listen as she speaks to her entrepreneurial experience and insight into the evolution of bank-to-bank payments. Show notes include: A look at the ACH and its advantages Useful links to other sources Podcast transcript Video snapshot The Payments on Fire® episode catalog The Glenbrook Education schedule  

There's a huge shift on the horizon. Want to learn about the state of cryptocurrencies in payments today? What about the entrepreneur’s journey in leading edge fintech and payments technology? Take a listen as Glenbrook partners George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan talk crypto, Diem, CDBCs, and the evolution of digital money with Ran Goldi, CEO of First Digital Assets Group. Goldi’s entrepreneurial story and experience with VC are well worth hearing as are his predictions for digital money’s future. Show notes include: A deep dive into cryptocurrency evolution Links to other sources Podcast transcript Video snapshot of Goldi's elevator pitch The Payments on Fire® episode catalog The Glenbrook Education schedule

Prepaid cards are the “apps” of the card world. Join George and Fiserv’s Head of Prepaid Dom Morea as they introduce prepaid’s twin modalities - open loop and closed loop - and then dive into how the gift card industry has morphed into a far broader set of uses cases. And plan to return for the next episode as they discuss open loop’s evolution. Card payments have four modalities: Charge Cards. There are charge cards that are a form of very short term credit, you pay off in full the monthly statement Credit Cards add the option of revolving all or a portion of the debt obligation and, if you do, you pay interest on those charges Both of these are products that we buy as consumers or businesses. And we’re paying with money we don’t have at the moment of the transaction. They are “pay after” products. Debit Cards. Debit Cards, on the other hand, are a feature of a specific checking account. It draws on funds that are available right now. It’s a “pay now” method. As soon as the issuer authorizes the transact

In our payments education workshops, we make the point that today’s fintechs rarely do something entirely new. At the macro level, our activities and the transactions they produce haven’t changed. We buy food and clothing. We pay rent. But where and how we do these things has been transformed by technology. A Great Time to Be a Fintech Fintechs are the newer, nimbler businesses that are most often changing how we do things. We buy tickets online, get takeout using our mobile phones, and file insurance claims via an app. Fintech entrepreneurs are busting old processes with much improved user experiences and “value for money” propositions. It’s a great time to be a fintech. The building blocks are in place. Powerful cloud-based capabilities are common. APIs connect these tools. Rich data and machine learning generate specific, actionable insights. iOS and Android give smartphones super powers. Business models like payment facilitation help some fintechs. You can even become a bank. Multiplayer Fintech Builds a

GPay is Google’s app for payments, financial services, rewards, and, is expanding its capabilities, its partnerships, and its ambitions. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan as they talk GPay with Steve Klebe, Google's head of GPay business development and Google's Processor and Partnerships work. Fairly recently, Google’s payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today’s GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many. Way More Than a Wallet A lot has happened since Steve joined us in July 2019. GPay has added incentives and loyalty more deeply as well as added expense management with automatic receipt discovery when sent to your Gmail account or via the camera. The incentives can turn into real money. In the U.S. Google has teed up its Plex bank account offerings in partnership with Citi and Stanford FCU (other FIs to come) for launch in 2021. You can already add bank accounts to GPay through Google’

A Global Phenom Realtime Retail Payments (RTRP) systems are a global phenomenon. These systems exist or will soon in over 50 countries around the world. Some have been in operation for decades. The UK’s Faster Payments system, operated by Mastercard’s Vocalink unit, has been in operation for over ten years. Still others are still in the design stage. These account-to-account systems (A2A) have gained in regulator popularity because: They are fast. The receiver has near instant availability They are push payment systems. Transactions don’t take place unless the sender has enough money to fund the transaction. In other words, authorization takes place before the transaction User authentication is up to the financial institution These systems operate year round, 24x7 They are inexpensive. Transaction pricing is fixed, regardless of the value of the payment itself They have rich data carrying capability Some include a new message type called Request for Payment, essentially a digital invoice message that prompts

Continuing our payments in fintech series, we talk about one of the major changes in the payments industry over the last few years: the installment lending phenomenon. Companies like AfterPay, Klarna, and Affirm (that just IPO'd and saw its stock double in one day) are leaders in this buy now, pay later (BNPL) space and appeal to Millennial and Gen Z users as well as the merchants selling to them. These firms offer a range of installment payment options: three, six, and 12 month payback periods are typical. The interest rate gets lower the shorter the payback period and, for the shortest period, that cost is eliminated. The merchant pays for it as promotional financing. These installment loan options generally increase the size of the sale and, because the BNPL provider may take on the risk and guarantee the sale, they remove a measure of risk from the merchant. In other words, for multiple merchant categories, they increase sales. BNPL providers accept multiple methods of payment: credit and debit cards and,

Faster Payments: Fundamental Tech for Payments Innovation Payments innovation comes in waves. And the wave that’s breaking on the U.S. - having swept over 50 countries around the world - is faster payments. Also referred to as Real-time Retail Payments (RTRP) these systems are fundamentally different from what’s come before: They are push payment systems They are new, systemically important domestic systems Risk and economic models are dramatically different than what’s come before They run 24/7 365 days a year. Go ahead, push money to and between accounts during your Sunday midnight snack Novel messaging and data formats open up new use cases and deep integration opportunities Most important, these are “clean sheet of paper” payment systems built for the Digital Age. Glenbrook has been working with these systems for over a decade. Our global experience gives us unique insight into how these systems are used and their real and potential impact on multiple stakeholders. Why This Course is For You If you are

The Fintech Phenomenon is rarely about doing something entirely new. It’s about doing things in a new way that better fits the needs of the target market. The fintech model also enables the provider to reach underserved market segments. Lending is, of course, the core offering of banks. But between their legacy processes, underwriting requirements, compliance demands, and more, they simply aren’t nimble enough to serve new segments in our evolving economy. And the banking crisis of 2008 left them even more risk averse. That’s left small business lending wide open to fintechs. Case in point: the online seller, that small business that makes a product or buys wholesale and sells direct to customers through their own website and, for most, through marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify. Cash Flow is Everything Here’s where success can kill a business. If their online store and what they’re selling catches on, they’ve got a tiger by the tail. They’ve already invested their own money to get the store off the ground.

In a crisp explanation of account takeover and authentication risks, George and Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security. They discuss the findings of a recent NuData report and its experience with the sophistication of online fraudsters. NuData’s techniques are all about foiling cybercriminals as they bang at the front door of financial institutions, merchants, streaming services, and more. Payments on Fire® listeners know that we’ve been taking a steady look at fraud issues over the past few years. Fraudsters have been pouncing on every opportunity, taking advantage of pandemic relief payments as well as the shift from card present to card not present, remote commerce transactions. If this topic didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be talking about it. Measuring and detecting what the fraudsters are up to and their impact is critical. To better understand what’s going on, we speak with Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security, a company that specializes in behav

Take a listen as George and Deluxe’s President and CEO Barry McCarthy discuss how the company continues to adapt to and prosper in the digital age. Barry talks about the journey the company has taken, in recent times shifting from a conglomerate model grown via acquisition to today’s streamlined and focused small business focused organization. The Journey from Paper to Digital Services In Glenbrook’s Payments Boot Camps® we make the point that fintechs rarely invent new functions out of whole cloth. What they do excel at is reimagining and reengineering the processes that incumbent players have been locked into for years. It’s the incumbent’s inability to adapt that puts them at a competitive disadvantage. As Charles Darwin put it: “The species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” We make this point in our training. Incumbent firms, no matter what the industry, survive and succeed over decades only if they have the ability to a

Open banking. It’s a term we started to hear about at the end of 2016 and since 2019 interest has remained high. That’s according to Google Trends. Along with those searches, the related hot topics were PSD2 and APIs. Regulation and technology is opening up access to bank accounts for payers, billers, and service providers. But the state of that openness varies by region and country with important consequences for billers, merchants, and their payment providers. In this wide ranging discussion, George and Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product Officer at GoCardless, cover a range of topics, all through the lens of the company’s primary value proposition, the use of direct debit from bank accounts to enable recurring and one-off payments across 30 different countries. As you'll appreciate, stitching together a network capable of using the domestic low cost rails (think ACH and BACS) in 30 different countries to provide both domestic and cross-border recurring payments is no easy task. Topics discussed include: The de

Financial inclusion for the poor is a global challenge. In this episode, we dive into the story of Mojaloop, a platform that enables interoperability and transaction routing between mobile money system operators, banks, and other providers. It’s a fascinating, and evolving, story. Take a listen. = = = = = =  Individual Benefits, Nation Building Impact Financial inclusion for the poor is a global challenge. Over two billion adults lack access to financial services. While that number is declining - and in no small part because of the work done by this episode’s guests - that level of digital disenfranchisement and cash dependence suppresses well being at multiple levels: Individuals must spend significant time to pay bills when they must travel to the biller or its agent, never mind travel to acquire cash. Carrying cash, of course, comes with its own set of risks Families suffer as time away from work and home reduces family income Entrepreneurs and small businesses face the same time penalty, high transaction

For a front row seat on payment innovation you have plenty of choices. Yes, Stripe and Square are based in the tech hotbed of the Bay Area and it’s tempting to stare at their success. But a look around the world reveals the evolutionary breadth of how payments are made, regulated, and brought to market. India and China alone reveal how remarkably different approaches can scale to enormous dimensions. There’s no better guide to what’s happening in payments around the world than Glenbrook’s own Carol Coye Benson. In this episode, Carol and George discuss her new book Global Payments and the Fintech Innovations Changing the Industry. Carol spent much of the last decade traveling throughout the world consulting to organizations on the impact of technology and business models on national payment infrastructure. The book is informed by the scores of discussions she’s had with tech executives, the leadership of development banks, government agencies, and fintech start-ups. Take a listen to why she wrote the book, so

2020 has been an active period for payments innovation. COVID-19 has been a forcing function for digital payments across multiple payment domains. “Touchless” and “contactless” payments are now common themes of retailer advertising. And, of course, many other trends have accelerated this year. Fintechs, mobile wallets, the expansion of open banking initiatives, and point of sale lending are trends with impacts spreading across the market. 2020 has also seen the increased legitimacy of blockchain-based payments as demonstrated by central banks around the world consider and even pilot digital fiat currencies. These are the topics Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan will present in Glenbrook’s Innovation in Payments Insight Workshop coming up December 8th and 9th. If keeping up with the changes in our industry and developing real insight into the key trends is important, you won’t find better guides than Russ and Yvette. Take a listen. Check out the agenda.  

COVID is a forcing function for digital channel growth across the world as consumers and businesses reduce their reliance on physical interactions. We’ve seen usage shifts in how bank accountholders in Peru transact - from branch to digital - as well as big shift in payment behavior. We outlined a lot of this in our own COVID series on Payments Views. Many merchants have turned to online as a matter of survival. Many restaurants, for example, have added order ahead and curbside pickup as standard offerings just to stay in business. Our assessment is that, even with an effective vaccine and adequate immunization rates, we’re never going to return to the same point. E-commerce transactions have increased, yet again, permanently. How much volume returns to the physical point of sale domain once COVID is behind us is unknown. But it’s not going to go back to previous levels. That shift is an opportunity for many in the payments industry, including fraudsters, those unwelcome stakeholders. They are taking advantag

You’d have to be aggressively disinterested in the payments industry not to be aware of its attraction to investors. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to dampen the interest, if not outright enthusiasm, for the payments industry among investors of all stripes. Actually, the pandemic has lit a fire under key industry segments like the e-commerce domain, digital banking, and disbursements. The dynamics of change pushing the payments industry ahead are only increasing. Incumbent Consolidation The payments industry has been dominated by networks and processors. While networks have remained largely independent, the processing industry has undergone tremendous consolidation over the last decade, accelerated recently by the giant acquisition of First Data by Fiserv. Scale really matters in processing. But that scale comes at the cost of agility because the incumbents must rely on the systems they already have and the ones they’ve acquired. Consolidation onto just a few platforms is hard. And that means incumben

This Payments on Fire® podcast is a joint production of Citibank and Glenbrook. Tony McLaughlin of Citibank interviewed our partner Erin McCune about the U.S. payments market and business transactions in particular. The U.S. payments landscape is in the midst of unprecedented change -- triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, new faster payment infrastructure, open banking and an overall acceleration of digitization. Business payments are particularly ripe for change. The pandemic has exposed businesses’ reliance on manual processes and motivating digitization and cloud migration. Although businesses have talked about pursuing electronic payments and treasury modernization efforts for some time the pandemic reveals the risk associated with manual processes dependent upon being in an office and reliant on the mail for delivery of invoices, checks, and other business documents. All of a sudden back office digitization is a c-suite concern. The emergence of faster payments has also catalyzed change in the business p

NACHA’s Phixius is a new service for the exchange of the information about a payment between the sender and receiver. Take a listen to Payments on Fire® host George Peabody as he discusses Phixius with NACHA Advisor Peter Tapling. He helps us understand Phixius, how it works and where it applies. It’s a compelling idea. One of the long standing shortcomings in payments systems has been the degree to which the data about a payment can be shared. If we can share the data about the payment, to have it run alongside the payment instructions, then we can do things like: Streamline bill payment Streamline supply chain payments We are able to get away from sharing bank account information We can check the status of accounts, regardless of financial institution One of the advantages of check payments is that, when physically mailed, the letter can contain the check as well as an explanation of what that check is paying for, perhaps including copies of all the invoices. That data is hugely important to the supplier.