Payments On Fire

Cross-border B2B payments are frustrating, time consuming, and expensive, especially for small and medium businesses. To dig into why and what's being done to overcome those concerns, join George and Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem, for an explanation. SMB B2B payments, particularly cross border payments, have always been time consuming to accomplish and expensive to do. They are time consuming because sending an international “wire” payment was historically slow with uncertain delivery timing and with uncertain, and high, costs to both the sender and the receiver. For the sender, the process of initiating a cross-border payment has always taken no little time compared, for example, to writing a check. Cost is a second concern because cross-border payment economics are not always transparent. At least a few times a year, when Glenbrook gets paid by one of our international clients, the funds we receive are less than what we invoiced. While our client sends us the correct amount at the prevailing exchange rate, in

The digital marketplace model brings together buyers and sellers and, frequently, handles the money and payouts to the sellers. As my guest today has determined, digital infrastructure, e-commerce usage, competition, and workforce characteristics influence a country’s ability to establish a flourishing marketplace component to the economy. This marketplace economic model is a useful one enabling, among other use cases, the gig economy. Adopted in countries like China, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and other established markets, this episode’s guest, Tomas Likar, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Hyperwallet, has done a lot of thinking about its role in these and other countries. This podcast was prompted by Hyperwallet’s February 2019 release of its Marketplace Expansion Index report, the MEI, that evaluated the marketplace readiness of some 36 countries. A surprise is the early stage of marketplace adoption in a number of otherwise highly developed countries. The application of the marketplac

The business of merchant services continues to undergo two forms of transformation. First, the merchant services businesses, either as acquiring banks or via non-bank acquirers, has undergone massive consolidation over the last five years and more. Fiserv’s takeover of First Data, announced on January 16, is just the latest example. The second sea change is the expansion of products and services these entities deliver. What was a fairly innovation-averse industry has become, under the competitive pressure of companies like PayPal and Square, far more committed to delivering value that helps customers run their business, not just accept card payments. At the POS, Square changed the merchant services game by delivering a great deal more business value to the small merchant than the traditional ISO or agent focused on placing stand-beside terminals next to dumb cash registers. For the price of payment processing, Square has given those merchants inventory, time and attendance, sales and marketing focused reporti

This Stuff is Hard As the remote payments domain (think in-app and browser-based payment transactions) continues to grow at around 15% a year, that growing number means the size and scale of fraud losses are going to increase. And they have - in both absolute terms and as a percentage of overall transaction volume. That also means rising chargeback rates for many merchants. Rising fraud in the online world is also a result of better security technology in the physical world. While EMV chip cards have dropped counterfeit losses way down, the fraudsters still have their own bills to pay. They’ve just shifted more aggressively to the card not present channel. A Delicate Balance All e-tailers face a delicate balance in managing fraud. If they err too far on the side of fraud minimization by tightening approval standards too far, they leave good sales on the table and insult customers with unnecessary declines (the “insult rate”). Of course, those customers promptly go to another site to make their purchase. The e

Ecommerce fraud rates are rising and that means more cardholders are seeing unauthorized charges on their accounts. The cardholder remedy is to call either the merchant or the issuer to flag the problem. If the cardholder turns to the issuer to resolve the problem, the remedy is often an expensive chargeback for the merchant and a generally lousy experience for everyone. Ecommerce Merchant Pain Ecommerce merchants have invested heavily in fraud detection tools because in the remote payment domain liability rules make them responsible for fraud losses. Ecommerce merchants employ sophisticated fraud management processes and tools to detect fraud in realtime to stop authorization (best in class fraud rates are 25 bps - 35 bps). On top of that, they must eat the direct costs associated with stolen goods and services. These include a chargeback processing fee from the acquirer as well as the merchant’s internal costs to manage the chargeback process. If the merchant fights the chargeback, the merchant has to gathe

Fraud prevention today is about how quickly we can separate good customers from questionable ones and, for those doubtful transactions, use the right set of tools and data sources to optimize speed, costs, and fraud losses. When it comes to fraud prevention, it turns out that data is key. No revelation there, but how we manipulate it, gather it, and assure its provenance is undergoing major change. What would be a revelation to fraud managers of a decade ago is the unbelievable amount of data and the wide variety of sources that we have today. It’s a flood. The only means we have to make sense of this data deluge is through algorithmic examination. Rules engines and neural networks are staple approaches. In recent years, application of artificial intelligence and the newer incarnation of machine learning (“let the computer figure it out based on all the data it sees”) has become a hot, and effective, area for fraud prevention. Only machines can find correlations among all that data in order to identify potent

Payment Innovation Moves to the Core When we conduct our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp, our first graphic illustrates the three essential steps in every transaction - initiation, funding, and completion. When looked at through the lens of of the past decade most innovation has been in initiation. Consider: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, QR codes. The list is long of ways to kick off a transaction. Funding is all about where the money comes from. Usually a bank account, often a wallet holding money. Some innovation there but not a great deal. There are only so many ways to store funds. Completion, the last step, is the most important to many participants as it’s when the transaction completes with the final movement of money. Five years ago, in those boot camps, I said that completion, also called settlement, is the innovation-resistant phase of a transaction. Today, everything has changed. In the U.S., we have new services such as Zelle and Venmo that appear to the end parties to deliver instant settlement. The

Restaurant payments is a complex area especially for those companies serving the mid-sized and large restaurant operator. They have different needs that extend well beyond payment acceptance but even that is a highly variable concern. Ever notice that we pay differently depending upon the type of restaurant we’re in? It’s always been walk up and pay the central server at McDonalds. Applebees uses Presto table top devices to speed table turns, upset desserts (“that lava cake sure looks good”) and take payments. At most sit-down establishments, especially those in the fine dining segment, we still hand over our cards and the server walks away to authorize the transaction (later that night, the manual tip adjustment process determine the final clearing amount.) For certain segments, order ahead is a priority. Order ahead dominates how pizza shop operate. Initially, that capability took market share from mom and pop pizza shops because only the largest operators in the “Big Pizza” segment could afford the necessa

For those of you who didn't make it to Money20/20 and want to hear the latest on The Clearing House's Real Time Payments Network (RTP), take a listen to this update conversation with Steve Ledford, SVP at The Clearing House for the RTP Network.    A year ago, The Clearing House got out of the gate with its Real Time Payments Network, a wholly new payments system based on the push payment model.    A lot has changed - more banks have integrated into the system and many more are in process. By the end of June 2019, over 3,000 FIs are expected to connect to RTP, most via their bank processor. B2B payments are taking place over RTP between known parties.   RTP Characteristics   Not All Things   TCH is not attempting to provide everything necessary for a ubiquitous push payment system. It relies on its FI participants and their processors to expose RTP capabilities to their customers. RTP hopesto have bank-friendly fintech partners use its rails through the traditional model that gives the new provider access to b

The payment industry’s responses to ongoing payment security are many. We have procedural approaches and technical ones. For example, we are requiring merchants to attest to their compliance with PCI security standards that themselves include procedural requirements. Technical solutions are also called out by PCI and are, of course, being applied across the ecosystem. Encryption of payment data in flight is one approach. In the physical POS world, semi-integrated POS terminals connect directly to the acquirer’s front end instead of passing card transaction data back through the merchant’s workstation and enterprise system. An important technique, and the topic of this discussion, is tokenization. Tokenization is an ancient security technique. In the broadest sense, a token is just a dummy representation of something of higher value. In cards, that means the replacement of a PAN with a number or even an alphanumeric value that represents the underlying PAN. The mapping between the two is stored in a vault with

In the US, there’s the automatic assumption that payment cards and perhaps PayPal are the way to pay online. But if you’re an ecommerce merchant trying to sell in the Netherlands, you’d better support the domestic system known as iDeal. Connectivity into domestic payment systems is an important and complex issue. There are over 150 such systems across dozens of countries around the world. While not all are important to a given merchant, most are important to the acquirers and payment service providers serving ecommerce merchants. Join George and Steve Villegas, VP Partner Management and Head of US Office, of London-based PPRO Group, a company that provides white label connectivity to these domestic systems by serving acquirers and PSPs alike.

Knowing who you’re dealing with online is critical if you’re taking transaction risk. Digital identity is tough. To address that challenge - and it is a challenge - relying parties, those who take on risk, employ two broad categories of technology: active tools that require user interaction and passive network-based approaches. When the user is required to explicitly provide identifying information, we use the interactive approach. The merchant or lender or website owner asks for user IDs, passwords, perhaps data generated by multi-factor authentication techniques such as biometrics, or one time passwords generated by an app or a hardware key. If you’re an ecommerce merchant or an entity trying to sell something online - lenders included - you don’t want to ask the customer to do more than absolutely necessary to complete a good sale. Transactional friction is deadly to revenues and a main cause of shopping cart abandonment. So, you use passive approaches that examine whatever data the customer’s device can p

Alexa. Siri. Cortana. We’re talking to or at our machines. I walk into my office and say “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” or “Hey Google, when’s my first appointment?” When I’m driving in a strange town, it’s “hey Google, navigate to the [fill in the blank] hotel.” This kind of hands-free access to information is hugely helpful and hugely popular. But there’s a long way to go toward a general purpose voice interface for every task we want to accomplish. That said, we’re getting there. In this conversation with Central 1’s Alex Chan, we discuss the process of voice-enabling access to the high volume queries that credit union members make, i.e. balance inquiries, balance transfers, etc. We cover what it takes to build an Alexa skill, the code that links Alexa’s natural language processing to the underlying application that executes the action. Voice design, the process of imagining and codifying how the user interaction proceeds, is at the heart of a successful voice-enablement project. Alex takes us through t

During the Glenbrook Payment Book Camp we make clear that national payments systems are domestic by definition. Each country has its own set of systems to effect payments. We point out that national payment systems differ in many of their details. Regulation, operating rules, governance, ownership, technology, and more are highly variable. At the same time, we also point out that major components are generally similar. An overnight, batch-based system for low-cost, low-value retail payments and an instant, irrevocable wire system for high-value transfers are typical of most countries. Across the planet, countries are planning, designing, trialing or enjoying fully deployed immediate funds transfer systems, new ones that instantly transfer lower value payments. The UK's Faster Payments system and The Clearing House's Real Time Payments (RTP) are two examples of this system type. Beside increased speed of payment, a second push for changes to national payment systems is the need for a richer representation of t

In this second discussion with First Data execs, George and Scott MacKay, Vice President, Strategic Solutions talk digital commerce in the automative space, both at the fuel pump and in the Connected Car. The importance of full stack security, whether it's sole sourced or the result of an integration effort, to successful deployment of mobile commerce is a theme here. Enabling the mobile experience at the fuel pump is complex. Petro sellers have a lot of legacy gear and the cost of upgrading that equipment is very high, a fact that has, at least, inhibited the pace of the EMV upgrade. The richness of the mobile device's data such as device fingerprinting and back end intelligence makes it conceivable that a fuel retailer could skip EMV altogether. Maybe. Scott also shares a look at payments and the Connected Car through the company's discussions with automobile manufacturers.

In this, the first of a two-part podcast series with First Data executives, Ajay Guru, VP of Merchant Fraud Solutions at First Data and George discuss the impact of fraud on the merchant, what the merchant has to do to manage it, and the classes of tools and techniques available to mitigate fraud. Ajay addresses machine learning technology's remarkable ability to identify anomalies and makes candid remarks on the necessity of human analysis to determine whether these anomalies are indeed fraud. Other topics discussed include behavioral analysis (how we enter our user ID and password into the browser) as well as the sophistication of today's manual and automated attacks. There is still a lot of CNP fraud taking place over the phone. There's good detail on the technology and what fraudsters are up to. Take a listen.

Online trust requires a context-based understanding of who we transact with. Attributes about us are needed to build that trust but in many transaction contexts we share more than we need to. To pick a simple example, the law says you must be 21 to buy alcoholic beverages but our current method of proof is to show our driver's license, an unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Why show that creepy barkeep where you live when you only need to prove you were born before 1997? In this wide-ranging Payments on Fire podcast, George and Lockstep Technology CEO Steve Wilson discuss how we share the attributes that, in aggregate, define to the online world who we are. Steve makes the case that security and identity professionals continue to encourage the oversharing of personal data. Now that we have sophisticated network-based fraud management tools - device fingerprinting, behavioral analytics, machine learning and AI - that generate a crisp profile of our devices and our behavior, the attributes that a u

This episode of Payments on Fire covers two topics - payments in Atlanta and the essential challenge of online authentication and identity. May in Atlanta - Fintech South and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp Everyone in the payments industry knows that Atlanta is a hotbed of activity. Coming shortly to Atlanta are two fintech-focused events that will add to the goings-on. The Fintech South conference takes place on May 7 and 8. With great speakers - and great sponsors like Glenbrook and the Technology Association of Georgia - the conference describes itself as “FinTech South 2018 is a global exchange of insights, innovations and trends fueling tomorrow's financial tech industry. “Attracting international companies and speakers across multiple industries, FinTech South is an opportunity to engage with 400 FinTech companies employing more than 130K employees globally, generating $72B in revenues, and processing over 118B transactions annually.” Speakers include: Kathryn Petralia, President and Co-founder of Kabbag

The rise of Chinese mobile payment systems is the top global mobile payments story of the last few years. Alipay and WeChat Pay serve hundreds of millions of users with payments, loyalty programs, merchant coupons, and more. QR codes are used to initiate many of these interactions especially within the point of sale (POS) domain. When there isn’t a legacy payment infrastructure in place, software is easier, and cheaper, to deploy than the hardware-reliant approaches used for card-based transactions. To serve its millions of accountholders traveling around the world, Alipay is building out its acceptance footprint. In this episode of Payments on Fire, George speaks with payments industry veteran Souheil Badran about his role as president of Alipay Americas and the company’s plans for reaching US merchants in tourist hotspots and beyond.

Mid-market financial institutions have enormously strong relationships with their banking customers. But their size makes home grown IT difficult because it is simply too hard, and too costly, to meet all the B2B finance needs of their enterprise customers. The answer, of course, is deeper integration to third party software systems like SAP, Oracle, JDA and the growing set of fintech providers brining point solutions to these institutions. But that’s no simple task. These FIs often run on legacy systems, generally provided by a large bank processor. Integrating software built before the cloud and APIs and these modern point applications is not easy. Into that gap is a new company called FI Span. Led by founder and CEO Lisa Shields, the company value proposition is to act as an API orchestration platform for banks. In other words, FI Span proposes to be the glue that connects legacy code or a processor’s banking platform to the growing base of fintech point solutions in the market. The goal of becoming a one-