In this episode, Rehman Baig, Chief Product Officer at FlexFactor joins Drew Edmond to talk about how FlexFactor is rethinking payments optimization through a Merchant of Record model. For most people in the industry, “Merchant of Record” is usually associated with global tax compliance and marketplaces, not optimization. But FlexFactor is using it to directly address failed payments and auth rate challenges in a way that merchants simply can’t do on their own. This is a fascinating conversation...
Jul 02, 2025•41 min
Would you let a software agent, powered by AI, search, select, and complete a purchase on your behalf? Will a merchant be able to tell if there’s a human or robot behind the transaction? What about risk and regulation concerns? Russ Jones and Drew Edmond spent some time at the Glenbrook water cooler this week to consider the rapidly emerging topic of agentic commerce and agentic payments. Tune in as they explore different industry perspectives in order to understand the implications of this new ...
Jun 26, 2025•33 min
In a series of episodes, Glenbrook's Joanna Wisniecka will to bring you up to speed on what’s happening globally as countries modernize payment networks and reach individuals and businesses through faster payment systems. In this episode, Joanna welcomes Sabine Mensah, Deputy CEO of AfricaNenda, a leader in financial inclusion, to explore Africa's dynamic path towards inclusive instant payment systems and the need for continued innovation and collaboration to enable access to financial services ...
Jun 19, 2025•49 min
Here’s a payments conundrum for you: We now have more ways to authenticate access to an online account or app than ever before. And yet, account takeover (ATO) - basically unauthorized access to an account - is at record levels. In this episode, Glenbrook’s Yvette Bohanan and Chris Uriarte are joined by Rocky Scales, CEO of IDgo, to explore this multifaceted problem. Tune in as they discuss the vulnerabilities in authentication techniques, the need for better consumer education, and how financia...
Jun 04, 2025•40 min
In this episode, Brant Peterson, Head of Enterprise Product, North America at Worldpay, joins Drew Edmond to talk about payment optimization through the perspective of a payment service provider. Worldpay is one of the world’s largest global PSPs - it processed over 2.5 Trillion Dollars in 2024, which was made up of 50 Billion transactions. Tune in to hear their perspectives on payment optimization and solutions that PSPs can offer merchant customers to help them improve their approval rates....
May 22, 2025•47 min
With this episode, we are launching a series to explore the current state of global financial inclusion efforts from a payments perspective. Joanna Wisniecka joins Yvette Bohanan to chat with Michael Wiegand, Director of Inclusive Financial Systems at the Gates Foundation, about the work the Foundation is doing globally and the transformative impact of digital financial inclusion on economies and societies.
May 07, 2025•51 min
Spec co-founder and CEO Nate Kharrl joins Yvette Bohanan on Payments on Fire to dig into some of the tactics and tech that is enabling today's fraud schemes, and how GenAI is redefining the payments risk landscape.
Apr 23, 2025•39 min
Glenbrook partners Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Simon Skinner jump on a special Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire to give a first take on the Global Payments acquisition of Worldpay. Tune in to hear their strategic perspective on the deal.
Apr 18, 2025•26 min
David Maimon, head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, joins Yvette Bohanan for another episode to raise awareness about different fraud tactics and their impacts. In this conversation, Yvette and David explore the intricacies and implications of Credit Profile Numbers (CPNs) and synthetic identity fraud, as well as “zombie debt” and assumed identity fraud. Listen in to hear the implications of these fraud schemes and how industry professionals can get ahead of them.
Apr 09, 2025•22 min
“Payments Performance Optimization” is a pretty broad term, and it might mean different things to different people. In a series of Payments on Fire episodes this year, Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond will be talking to guests who are approaching payments optimization from a variety of different angles, with a focus on primarily online, card not present merchants. At the end of the day, a merchant wants the maximum number of good transactions to be authorized successfully. It sounds so simple. But is any...
Mar 26, 2025•40 min
As legal and regulatory restrictions have become relaxed in recent years, we’ve been noting the increasing prevalence of surcharges on payment cards here in the U.S. Perhaps it was inevitable that the practice would become more commonplace in our market, which is known around the world for relatively high rates of card interchange and a relatively light touch in financial services regulation. Surcharging is a tricky issue with a lot of different stakeholder perspectives to consider. In this epis...
Mar 12, 2025•30 min
In 2024, to our great delight, we had a conversation with David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink. We’re fortunate to welcome David back for a quarterly series this year to check in on payments fraud writ large - to better understand what’s happening and why. Listen in to this episode as Yvette and David discuss the evolution and resurgence of check fraud, the increasing sophistication of fraud rings targeting banks and the government, and the adaptation of new technologies, including ...
Feb 27, 2025•36 min
In this episode, Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward, joins Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman to share insights on the evolving partner banking space, the importance of risk and compliance frameworks, and Pathward's mission of financial inclusion. Tune in as they also discuss potential policy and regulatory changes due to implications of major discrepancies in the banking-as-a-service arrangement between fintech platform Synapse and its banking partners.
Feb 12, 2025•45 min
In this episode, Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones join Yvette Bohanan to discuss Glenbrook’s focus on payments education and share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34,000 (and counting) payments geeks. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes insights from their workshop experiences and highlights from the latest offering, On-Demand Learning, as Glenbrook continues to evolve payments education with the changing industry landscape.
Jan 29, 2025•32 min
Booshan Rengachari, CEO of Finzly, joins Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and Simon Skinner to discuss how software, fast payments, and open banking are reshaping the banking industry and the way we think about financial services. Tune in as they cover the challenges of modernizing legacy banking systems, the rise of fast payments, and the potential of open banking to integrate banking services into everyday life. The episode also explores fraud prevention in fast payment systems and the evolving ...
Jan 16, 2025•45 min
The Glenbrook partners reflect on key trends and challenges in the payments industry that shaped 2024 - from generative AI, open banking, the evolving regulatory landscape, and the rise of fast payment systems worldwide. And you can't get the Glenbrook team in a "room" without discussing ongoing fraud implications, orchestration in merchant payments, and the progress of tokenization. Tune in to hear insights from our industry experts on these themes and more as we wrap up the year and look towar...
Dec 05, 2024•51 min
Real end-to-end testing requires real-world transactions. Sometimes that’s not too difficult to do if you are implementing payments in your own country. But step outside your border, and it gets a bit harder. People new to payments turn to logical solutions when faced with this problem. Can you call the acquirer? Won’t they have test accounts for us to use? (Probably not.) Can’t we just drip a few transactions through with a few live customers to see how it goes? (Sure, but you may wait a long t...
Nov 20, 2024•44 min
Payments and treasury are two sides of the same coin. Payments teams are responsible for the customer journey - payments into a company and sometimes disbursements to sellers, app developers, content creators, or vendors. Their role usually includes working with banks and other providers to ensure money moves into and out of the company’s accounts correctly and efficiently. Treasurers are responsible for managing cash, ensuring the efficient flow of funds, and ensuring that things like currency ...
Nov 06, 2024•47 min
Yvette Bohanan and Russ Jones celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the announcement of Apple Pay by reflecting on its origins, challenges, and successes. The episode highlights key features like tokenization, encryption, and biometric authentication, emphasizing Apple Pay's focus on security, privacy, and convenience. Tune in to take a look back at Apple Pay’s significant impact on the payments industry and a look forward to its continued expansion.
Oct 23, 2024•30 min
One of the existential challenges remaining in payments is the need to accurately authorize transactions conducted online. While markets like the EU, UK and India have mandated strong customer authentication for online transactions, the U.S. is the largest market where such stepped-up authentication remains optional. Only a very small portion of eCommerce purchases utilize the 3-D Secure protocol due to lingering concerns about imposing friction and delay on a consumer base that thrives on conve...
Oct 09, 2024•51 min
While “paying into” a company comes with nuance and complexity, it’s really nothing compared to what is involved when a business attempts to make an outgoing payment. Most of us don’t think very much about these “payouts”. It’s been the domain of ERP software for decades, often an asterisk mentioning “supported payments”. Whether you are talking about B2B payments, expense reimbursements, or mass disbursements to gig workers, payouts started having a moment a few years ago. Manish Vrishaketu, Ch...
Sep 25, 2024•45 min
It’s September 2024, and this month, we’re focusing on business-to-business payments. B2B payments are difficult because so much information must be exchanged for them to process efficiently. But there’s more to it than that. B2B payments are many things to many people - for finance teams, they are “payables”; for gig economy companies, they are “payouts”; for providers, like insurance companies, they are “claims payments.” The list goes on - and within each of these sub-categories, there are ni...
Sep 11, 2024•36 min
The introduction of real-time payments in the U.S. market has been unfolding for several years now, but it seemed to pick up momentum in the last year as FedNow came to market. We now have over 1,000 banks live with real-time payments (at least for receiving) and a solid majority of transaction accounts are now reachable via FedNow, The Clearing House’s RTP system, or both. We wanted to understand whether we might be reaching the elusive “tipping point” for real-time payments in the U.S. and whi...
Aug 28, 2024•40 min
Sometimes an episode sticks with me. It just keeps coming back in different ways. Reading an article, having a conversation, even watching TV can make me stop and reflect on a recording. This is exactly what has been happening since we sat down with Dr. David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to talk about fraud. As always, we covered a lot of ground in this episode. As you might expect, we talked fraud trends. What you might not expect is a conversation, most enlightening, on the psy...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 2 min
In this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire, Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Russ Jones discuss Mastercard's bold June announcement to eliminate manual card number entry for eCommerce transactions in Europe by 2030, and explore the challenges and necessary steps to achieve this goal. The conversation centers around three core components from the announcement: tokenization, streamlined guest checkouts, and authentication via passkeys. Tune in to hear more about the mechani...
Jul 31, 2024•34 min
Authentication and identification are top of mind for payments professionals battling fraud these days. We’ve made progress over the past two decades in managing payments risk in the digital era, but fraud continues to evolve and often seems to be one or several steps ahead. The classic cat-and-mouse game has moved to a point where “Are you really you?” and “Should you have access to this account?” are the questions that are both increasingly critical and elusive to answer. In this episode, we t...
Jul 17, 2024•57 min
As scams, ransomware, account takeovers, and old-fashioned data breaches persist in our personal and business lives, we are all pondering how to get ahead in the cat-and-mouse game that global fraud rings seemingly have mastered. With this episode, we’re setting the stage for a series of discussions on authentication and identity, the critical components of tackling this pervasive issue. We’re embarking on a journey of perspective gathering from some of the industry’s leaders in risk management,...
Jul 03, 2024•23 min
For decades, technology, regulations, and dissatisfaction with the status quo have formed a powerful triad, driving payments innovation. This triad is fueled by investors and innovators seeking to disrupt and legislators and agencies seeking to enforce compliance, increase transparency, and enhance fairness. In this episode, John Pitts, Head of Policy at Plaid, sat down with Yvette Bohanan to discuss open banking and its potential to change the finance industry’s playing field: How consumers man...
Jun 19, 2024•48 min
In this episode, we fan the flames to get Glenbrook’s hot takes on the proposed Capital One acquisition of Discover. Now that the dust has settled a bit on the February announcement, and while we wait with bated breath to see if the regulators will sign off on this deal, we wanted to debate the potential winners and losers - and possible outcomes - of an acquisition. We spend some time discussing how this combination would impact some key stakeholder groups - networks, banks, processors, payment...
Jun 05, 2024•38 min
In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Glenbrook Managing Partner Bryan Derman and guests Michele Alt and Adam Shapiro, Partners at the Klaros Group. The result is a lively discussion about regulators and the impact of the current regulatory environment on banks and fintechs, a topic of utmost relevance in today's rapidly evolving industry landscape. The economy and all that is at play during a major election year create a fascinating backdrop for this conversation.
May 23, 2024•52 min
