Welcome to Payments on Fire® and to our third, now annual, discussion with Steve Ledford, SVP Products and Strategy at The Clearing House, and the leader of his company’s Real Time Payment Network initiative. As in prior conversations, Steve and George discuss the growth of the RTP Network both in terms of transactions and dollar volume as well as an important metric, the growth in the number of financial institutions and FI processors who are already or in process of connecting to the network. ...
Mar 31, 2020•40 min
Be Safe. Be Well. Help Out. This is our era’s unprecedented event. I hope you’re staying safe, your family is all well, and you’ve got what you need for what looks to be a pretty long time. On the upside, I’ve seen and experienced people helping one another like never before. That gives me confidence we’ll be able to mitigate COVID-19’s impact on our healthcare system - and on all of us. The downside is obvious. The weight of the pandemic is going to come down heaviest on those with the fewest r...
Mar 24, 2020•40 min•Season 6Ep. 117
Sometimes events delay things. Other times, they hasten them. At Glenbrook, the corona virus has sped us along a path we’ve been traveling for some time. The path is digital delivery of the Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp®. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Russ Jones, partner in charge of Glenbrook’s education team, talks with George about two major changes in our payments education program. 1. Digital Delivery - what it looks like, how it works, and when we will launch it for our public particip...
Mar 16, 2020•19 min•Season 6Ep. 116
Fraudster innovation is a constant. As the defenders of payment transactions thwart one fraud vector, these innovators, playing offense, switch tactics. Today, the problem of knowing who you are, that you are who you say you are, in the digital domain demands stronger authentication techniques. Many of those rely on the attributes, the data, provided by the user or by the applicants in the case of credit extension. In turns out that even the data supplied by applicants can be both entirely bogus...
Mar 12, 2020•33 min•Season 6Ep. 115
On Payments on Fire® we’ve talked with gateway operators, processors, tokenization specialists, fraud management firms, and others - all providers who help payment acceptors handle their payments. The range of services and business value they deliver varies a lot. Some providers do everything. Others, like Spreedly , the subject of this Payments on Fire® podcast, focus on a narrower set of functions and business outcomes. Payment Flow and the Payment Service Provider (PSP) When we talk about mer...
Mar 06, 2020•42 min•Season 6Ep. 114
In this Payments on Fire® podcast, we examine the role of a payment service offered through a commerce solution targeted at the small and medium business (SMB) market. To do that, we talk with Nan Siler, Head of Payments Strategy and Operations, at Kabbage. The small and medium business market is important to both the national and local economies. It’s big. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 40% of GDP is generated by this segment. Over the last decade and more, SMBs have ...
Feb 26, 2020•23 min•Season 6Ep. 113
As our lives shift online, our providers needs strong digital representations of each of us in order to make authentication and authorization decisions. Besides payment transactions, there are the diverse risks they must manage when, for example, we establish new credit relationships, add new payees to our online accounts, and move money in new ways. The providers of these capabilities—and often a single party offers multiple services—must be concerned with the associated risks each poses. This ...
Feb 04, 2020•31 min•Season 6Ep. 112
The U.S. has just come off a record setting holiday shopping season with e-commerce sales rising over 18%. While the numbers aren’t in yet, there’s no doubt the fraudsters also had a record year. There are so many ways to defraud consumers, merchants, and financial institutions. At Glenbrook, we are optimistic about our longer term ability to deter, prevent, and detect fraud. Our kit is getting better. The combination of tech and rule making will payoff: strong authentication enabled by standard...
Jan 03, 2020•40 min•Ep. 111
Deployment of “clean sheet of paper” payment systems is a once in a generation event. In over 50 countries, new account-to-account push payment systems are either in full scale operation, implementation, or fully committed planning stages. The U.S., for example, has the RTP Network in operation and, in a few years, the FedNow system will be online. This is hard, serious work. Technology decisions need to be paired with equally rigorous rules making. One of the major concerns for these systems is...
Dec 09, 2019•35 min•Ep. 110
If you thought bitcoin was dead as a payments system, take a listen to George and Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of the Bitcoin Association , as they discuss Bitcoin SV, a new version of bitcoin that is a significant upgrade to the performance and capabilities of the original bitcoin protocol put into the world a decade ago. From a payments perspective, bitcoin has failed. While successful as an albeit volatile store of value, its failings include: It is slow, only able to handle 2 or 3 transa...
Nov 27, 2019•38 min•Ep. 109
Join Jeff Brown, president of VPay , a firm specializing in insurance claims payments, and George Peabody of Glenbrook Partners in this deep dive discussion of how the work of claims processing is done and how he approaches B2B payments, compliance, and the value-added services needed by the company’s customers. The B2B Domain We’re all familiar with the card present POS domain, card not present Remote domain, P2P payments, and the Bill Pay domain. A phone tap here, a card swipe there, a bill pa...
Nov 19, 2019•44 min•Ep. 108
Digital disruption and financial inclusion are focus areas throughout the developing world and the topics are white hot in Colombia. Listen in as Hernando Rubio, CEO of Moviired, speaks with Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody about Movii and payment / financial inclusion ecosystem in Colombia. Financial Inclusion in Colombia Although one of the first countries in Latin America to make a big policy push for financial inclusion, those efforts focused a “banking correspondents” or agents in loca...
Nov 14, 2019•37 min•Ep. 107
The merchant acquiring industry continues its large scale shift from a payments-led to an operations-led purchasing decision for the merchants it serves. Historically based on independent sales organizations (ISOs) and non-bank acquirers, the party that increasingly provides payment acceptance is the independent software vendor (ISV). This makes sense for a number of reasons: Software is Vertical . Today, the first IT choice more merchants make is the software they use to run their business. Thi...
Nov 08, 2019•29 min•Ep. 106
Take a listen as George and Nick Starai, Chief Strategy Officer of NMI discuss the role of the independent payments gateway and its evolution as a technology and business enabler for today’s providers of payment acceptance: ISOs, ISVs, and merchants. A key technology and business partner for merchants and the first-line providers of payment services (think ISVs and ISOs) is the payment gateway. At their simplest, gateways provide a single interface to their users that, once built, lets the party...
Oct 25, 2019•44 min
Take a listen to Ian Drysdale of Zelis Payments and George as they discuss how complex the payments process is in the healthcare industry. Near the peak of payments complexity and specificity is the healthcare industry. If you’ve ever looked at an explanation of benefits letter from a healthcare insurer, you’ve had a glimpse into the complexity of these payments. Multiple parties are paid a lot of money, before you may be required to ante up a co-payment yourself. Regulation, compliance, the hug...
Oct 18, 2019•31 min
Need an early warning system for what payment system hackers are about to do? Then knowing what’s happening on the dark net is imperative. In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George speaks with Aamna Zia, VP of Finance and Growth at Flare Systems , and David Hetu, its Chief Science Officer. Based in Montreal, Flare Systems operates a dark net monitoring system that brings intelligence to the InfoSec and fraud management teams at banks. The dark net is a mysterious place for most of us. It exis...
Oct 03, 2019•45 min
Listen to George and Jacques Soussana, General Secretary, of nexo Standards , an organization based in Europe with global goals to establish interoperability of hardware, software, and data across the point of sale and e-commerce domains. Interoperability in a Complex Ecosystem The payments industry is in a period of especially swift change. New methods of payment, new payment systems, new ways to initiate a purchase. Innovation can be wonderful, improving convenience, speed, and reliability. Bu...
Sep 21, 2019•39 min
A Better Way, Please Last week I tried to connect my accounts at two different banks. Between account type mismatches (my bad), long account numbers, ACH micro-deposits, and balky websites, well, I’ll confess I put a check in the mail as a “quicker” way of overcoming the electronic barriers. Snail mail. Really? That situation, and many more where speed matters, is exactly why the world is turning to faster payment systems that allow the accountholder to push money from an account she controls to...
Sep 16, 2019•28 min
For a nanosecond, about seven years ago, I thought the payments industry was entering a steady state where change, while sure to be accelerated by technology, was going to settle down to the familiar sedate pace the payments industry had taken for decades. Hah! Payment industry evolution has leapt forward since then based on, yes, technology, but also new rules, regulations, business models, and changes in attitude toward how money moves, security, and privacy. One major trend I didn’t anticipat...
Aug 20, 2019•27 min
One of the privileges of using a card to make a payment is the ability to dispute that charge should something go wrong. Maybe you ordered one garden rake but got charged for two. Perhaps you ordered a sweater and, as my colleague Allen Weinberg puts it, “got shipped a box of rocks.” Or you discover a charge that you didn’t make on your card account and believe it’s fraudulent. In all those cases, the dispute process involves a chargeback. The cardholder disputes the charge, the issuer credits t...
Aug 08, 2019•31 min•Ep. 99
The global spread of digital payments gets a huge boost from giants like Google. Google’s Google Pay is far more than just a wallet, and the subject of this Payments on Fire® episode with Steve Klebe. Steve heads Google’s Processor and Partnerships business and has terrific experience in our industry, working with payment gateway CyberSource, payment security firm RSA, and carrier billing firm BilltoMobile. He’s also served multiple times on the board of the Electronic Transaction Association. I...
Jul 17, 2019•47 min
Here on Payments on Fire® we've spoken a lot with risk and fraud management firms that generally offer some combination of services and technologies that promises to lower customer exposure to payments fraud, data theft, and operational risk. There’s another dimension to cyber security that’s based on expertise - before and after a data breach. That's the subject of this episode. First, a company needs to understand its overall exposure. What do we have and what can we afford to lose? That takes...
Jul 10, 2019•37 min
The task of risk management in the payments business keeps getting bigger. Where once the concern was confined to payments alone - starting with counterfeit checks and currency - payment electronification has created a universe of potential risks. Risk now includes fraudulent cards, system and network hacks, data breaches, and account takeover with all the havoc that can produce. And we’re seeing how these impact the reputation and value of businesses even when the hack has nothing to do with pa...
Jun 12, 2019•44 min
One of the biggest payments challenges for merchants is how to handle payment data - whether it’s at the POS or in the remote domain where e-commerce and mobile payments take place. A lot of this concern is driven directly by PCI DSS compliance and broadly by the reputational risk data breach represents. One of the major techniques merchants employ, in order to remove the need to store payment data, is tokenization - the replacement of the high value card data with a low value representation man...
Jun 10, 2019•43 min
Digital identity is one of the most solution resistant challenges to online commerce and, indeed, our online lives. It is basic to online trust, an elusive condition undermined by data breaches, abuse of our data by service provider, and fraudsters. That’s not say we aren’t trying. Providers of all stripes are applying their value add to the problem. Smartphone makers have a role. Fraud management providers see themselves as having a role because they see so many users visiting their merchant cu...
Jun 06, 2019•36 min
Ever wonder about EMVCo's role in the development and implementation of its technical specifications? Take a listen to Bastien Latge, EMVCo's director of technology and Glenbrook's George Peabody as they discuss EMVCo's EMV®* QR Code Specification for QR code-based transaction initiation in the card system. While developed card markets are shifting to contactless cards and NFC-using mobile phone wallets to kick off payments, the QR code offers a flexible, very low cost alternative. There's a lot...
May 17, 2019•33 min
Payments on Fire® usually focuses on a single topic, typically a fintech company and the business or personal challenges it addresses. In this episode, we take another direction by bringing together three fintech leaders to talk about their company offerings, how they connect up to payments, and some of the obstacles they’ve faced. George talks with the leadership of three companies working in very different areas: remittances, small business logistics payments, and healthcare. Mike Gaburo, CEO ...
Apr 12, 2019•29 min
Five years on from Apple Pay’s release, contactless payment cards are just getting off the ground here in the US but in much of the rest of the card world, contactless payments of both kinds are common practice. In London, half of the card transactions are contactless. The same is true in Canada. While it’s true that the vast majority of these are card-based, not via mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, even the mobile wallets are gaining momentum. To expand contactless usage, Mobeewave...
Apr 12, 2019•42 min•Ep. 91
The UK and the EU take a very different approach to payments industry evolution than here in the States; the former directed by government mandate, the latter by marketplace dynamics and the lighter touch of regulators. But both are responding, at different speeds, to the need of fintechs and enterprises for access to bank-based data and services. The Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2, written in 2015 and in effect since January of 2018, addresses a range of concerns including a ban on surcharg...
Apr 12, 2019•30 min
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 w...
Mar 26, 2019•36 min
