Payments on Fire™

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.