In Episode 231, Samantha Gordon and Simon Skinner discussed the orchestration framework they developed to help our clients decipher a somewhat overused term in the industry. It was a great discussion, and if you missed it, I recommend you give it a listen. We covered a lot of ground in that episode that sets up this conversation with John Lunn, CEO and Founder of Gr4vy. While preparing for this podcast, John observed that “every merchant has an orchestration platform; they just don’t call...

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,...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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....

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...