Payments On Fire

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