B2B payments are huge. Taken together, these supply chain payments exceed the gross domestic product. But supply chain payments remain an imperfect art. While consumers pay for one purchase at a time, a B2B payment may cover multiple invoices, each with different commercial terms. Given the amount of data about the payment that’s necessary to crisply communicate between a buyer’s accounts payable department and a seller’s receivables group, it’s no wonder paper checks are still in broad use. Whi...
Aug 11, 2017•29 min
The Faster Payments Task Force has brought together a broad constituency with the payments industry thoroughly represented. And thanks to participation by organizations like Consumers Union, the people who bring us Consumer Reports , the voice of the consumer has been well represented in determining important evaluation criteria. Christina Tetreault , staff attorney at Consumers Union , joins Glenbrook’s George Peabody for this podcast discussion on faster payments, the consumer benefits these n...
Aug 08, 2017•30 min
Merchant adoption of EMV capability isn’t a done deal in the U.S. Glenbrook’s own estimates show that we’re only halfway there. Few people have as much insight into merchant payment acceptance and the technology that enables it as Larry Godfrey of Global Payments ’ Heartland Payments business. Take a listen to George and Larry’s discussion as they cover: The EMV terminal transition The chargebacks that many merchants have encountered (looking at you, LA) Contactless payments Security and encrypt...
Aug 01, 2017•22 min
Consumer billing payments get complicated in the healthcare space. Co-payments are bigger than ever as are the medical bills. Consumers need prompting to pay and even incentives to get those big bill onto a payment plan. With higher co-payments, smaller insurance payments, and so many patients having to deal with large medical bills, providers need services to take on the revenue management task. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and David Yohe of the billing specialist BillingTree as they discuss...
Jul 28, 2017•30 min
The Internet of Things may be a hot topic but its security isn’t hot at all. Up until recently, IoT device manufacturers and buyers haven’t cared much about security, a disinterest that’s led to over one hundred thousand surveillance cameras being hijacked by Mirai botnet malware. While cameras aren’t making or accepting payments (yet) it’s easy to imagine automobiles paying for tolls and fuel directly. If it’s not my Roku box, maybe it’s Alexa or Google Home that makes payments on my behalf ove...
Jul 24, 2017•37 min
The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring us a tsunami of network-enabled devices, for consumer use as well as yet to be imagined industrial and commercial applications. Many of these devices will be payment enabled, many using card payment rails. Securing those billions of IoT devices is going to require techniques deployed by the mobile industry, the card industry, and other sectors. Cryptographic hardware will be part of the solution. The answers, of course, will include multiple methods and mo...
Jul 07, 2017•22 min
Bringing electronic payment capability to small merchants is a major hurdle for multiple developing economies. In this Payments on Fire podcast with Glenbrook co-founder Allen Weinberg and George Peabody, we discuss merchant enablement in markets reliant on 2G wireless and feature phones. We take a deeper look at India’s payment evolution in particular. Allen’s observations come from his recent work in India and the insights into payment system success factors he’s developed. Take a listen!...
Jun 19, 2017•26 min
Bringing payments and financial services to those of us with a tenuous connection to the banking system is the goal of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. FinLab , a joint effort by the CFSI and JPMorgan Chase, is a five year effort, now in its third year, that’s using a competition for funding and business support to broaden American financial services options. When nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 ready money, better financial management tools can help. Join FinLab’s Managing...
Jun 12, 2017•36 min
Payments transactions generate plenty of useful data for merchants. But wrangling that data into informative shape gets challenging, especially when multiple acquirers, gateways, processors, or other service providers are used. Each one has a different approach to reporting and some are (much) better than others. Developing a consolidated view and, as important, reconciling financials from different sources is a time consuming task for staff who need timely data on multiple concerns. Addressing ...
May 16, 2017•28 min
The term identity gets used a lot whenever internet payments and security are discussed. Knowing who we transact with is still the knotty problem. Strong authentication is required. Identity verification is required, too. A means of sharing the fruits of that work among the parties involved, especially those taking on risk, could save everyone a lot of cost and effort. That’s the notion behind federated identity and other means of securely sharing identity attributes without undermining privacy....
Apr 04, 2017•32 min
Want to know what it takes to to stay smart in payments? Take a listen to Russ Jones, the Partner in Charge of Glenbrook’s Payments Boot Camp program. Russ gives a look behind the scenes, talks over the boot camp’s evolution, and how it stays forward looking in what’s become a fast changing industry. Over 13,000 payments professionals have experienced the Payments Boot Camp Russ talks about in this Payments on Fire podcast.
Mar 27, 2017•21 min
Sometimes a change in direction is the way forward. Network aspirant Dwolla has recently pivoted its work toward the product and development teams inside financial institutions. Instead of being a system operator, Dwolla now offers a broad set of APIs designed for those FIs to take advantage of the ACH’s overnight and Same Day ACH services. Dwolla’s shift also comes as the company and the US anticipates the impact of new immediate funds transfer systems Zelle, The Clearing House, and likely othe...
Feb 16, 2017•33 min
Turning money movement into a core capability of the internet is the guiding principle of Circle Internet Financial . Not an easy task. While technical issues abound, regulatory and business hurdles pose larger challenges. Join Payments on Fire host George Peabody and Circle’s co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville for this discussion on Circle’s geographic expansion, its recent shift in bitcoin support, and its development of Spark, a blockchain-based open source smart contract platform op...
Jan 11, 2017•25 min
One of last year's most anticipated advances in fraud management was the final release of EMVCo’s 3D Secure 2.0 protocol specification. Designed to take a risk-based approach to authorization and lower the checkout friction of its predecessor, 3DS2 will be a new tool in the growing anti-fraud arsenal. One of its supporters and a service provider that’s been closely tied to 3D Secure is CardinalCommerce. Cardinal, now a new addition to Visa’s arsenal with its recent acquisition, has been working ...
Jan 03, 2017•32 min
In e-commerce and mobile commerce the problem of false declines is significant, especially during the holidays. Issuers decline transactions that online merchants approve. And vice versa. In other words, the necessary process of sorting out fraud from good transactions catches good transactions with the bad. This poor decision making means merchants lose the sale and the issuer its transaction fees. In this Payments on Fire podcast, Glenbrook 's George Peabody discusses the false decline issue w...
Dec 20, 2016•23 min
Multiple organizations have emerged to address different aspects of security, privacy, and identity. In this Payments on Fire Podcast, Glenbrook ’s George Peabody speaks with Craig Spiezle, Executive Director of the Online Trust Alliance , an organization bringing together privacy and security best practices for a range of industries, including payments. Take a listen to this conversation about the security challenges ahead, especially around the Internet of Things....
Dec 14, 2016•23 min
Faster payments, B2B payments, international remittances, cross-currency, and cross-border payments. These are hot topics and major challenges the payments industry must address. Central to all is the ability to represent, in an interoperable fashion, the information that surrounds the payment itself. What’s this payment for? Who is it for? Where’s it going? These are information gaps that bedevil B2B payments and all of the above. Extensible standards in general and ISO 20022 in particular are ...
Oct 10, 2016•24 min
As the breadth of transaction data expands, even the definition of payment data is getting stretched. Payment data, when combined with other sources, is becoming a valuable tool for both commerce and security. If we know your first name, we can figure out if you’re male or female 92%+ of the time. If your email address is at AOL, you’re probably over 50. What you might buy can be inferred from the websites you visit. And that’s just the start of data’s role in payments. Take a dip into the payme...
Sep 22, 2016•22 min
Bitcoin’s reliability and transaction-level security has inspired today’s explosion of blockchain pilots, companies, and consortia. But the bitcoin rails already have solid commercial applications. Circle Internet Finance has focused on person to person payments. Align Commerce has focused on international B2B payments for smaller businesses. With growth, both have blended bitcoin rails with more traditional methods to accomplish fast, cost effective transfers. Join Marwan Forzley , CEO of Align...
Aug 05, 2016•28 min
Stretching the retail financial institution’s (FI) mission beyond checking account and debit card management is on that industry’s agenda. It’s what fires the imagination of fintech entrepreneurs too because retail financial services is an industry in need of creative, expansive approaches to accountholder services. Not every idea catches fire but fortunately there are those willing to light a match. This Payments on Fire podcast looks at Sensibill , a digital receipting and data repository serv...
Jul 15, 2016•23 min
Machine learning and the broader category of artificial intelligence are rightly attracting attention and discussion. These are powerful technologies. But, like many new technology conversations, there’s the suggestion that they can address all use cases. Maybe focusing on a single use case is the better approach right now. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Nuno Sebastiao , Chairman and CEO of fraud management firm Feedzai , in this refreshing discussion about the role of machine learning in f...
Jul 07, 2016•36 min
Digital identity is the black hole of the internet. Our online lives simply aren’t protected by a system without strong authentication. Killing the password is Mission One for security professionals because they’re so readily stolen through phishing attacks and malware. Users, warned to make passwords complex and unique, have no hope of remembering them. And a password is simply one factor of secure authentication. Biometrics and data, when used in combination, can relieve password fatigue and, ...
Jun 30, 2016•31 min
Chargebacks are one of the card system’s great consumer benefits. If fraud happens, the merchant doesn’t deliver on what was promised, or you’re charged six times for something you bought just once, the chargeback mechanism returns your money or restores your credit. What’s not to like? Well, if you’re a merchant, a lot. While there are plenty of legitimate chargebacks, there are also consumers who take advantage of the system through “friendly fraud,” the “I didn’t do it” chargeback category ab...
Jun 21, 2016•30 min
This episode of Glenbrook’s Payments on Fire podcast comes from the Shoptalk conference, mid-May 2016. Focused on the entire customer engagement cycle, the attendees are all about influencing consumer behavior, the processes of moving customers through that cycle, about making some portion of enterprise IT work more smoothly, or, yes, even about payments. Take a listen to my conversations with start-ups Tuku (in-store digital content delivery), Belly (in-store loyalty), Bold Financial Technologi...
May 17, 2016•31 min
Payments industry professionals naturally have a hard focus on the industry’s own dynamics. So, it’s not uncommon to lose sight of who the customer is and who pays the freight. In retailing, yes, the consumer pays, but payments is a direct cost to the merchant. With all of the changes underway in the U.S. payments landscape, merchants now view payments as a complex, strategic element of their business, both as a way to drive new sales as well as a cost component to be tightly managed. To learn w...
May 11, 2016•23 min
Extension of credit to people in developing markets has been a long time challenge. Banks, of course, look to repayment history to make such determinations but in much of the world, banking relationships and repayment track records are few. But history has demonstrated that extension of credit in developing markets can be effective and profitable. Just look at the Grameen Bank’s high micro-loan repayment rates. To address this repayment data dearth, Lenddo.com developed a lending data set in mul...
May 01, 2016•29 min
The world of moving money is changing. And faster is the theme. Domestic real time payment systems are showing up across the planet. Today's discussion is full of bitcoin, open and permissioned blockchain approaches to speed asset exchange. But the competitive balance between proprietary and open systems is in flux. The view that moving money is or should be an internet-wide capability is a guiding principle for Jeremy Allaire , founder and CEO of Circle . Take a listen to Jeremy on how Circle i...
Apr 20, 2016•28 min
The Smart Card Alliance has been educating payments, government, and security professionals since 2008 on the fundamentals of smart card technology and how smart cards are put work across a range of use cases. In this Payments on Fire podcast, Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director of the SCA and the EMV Migration Forum, talks about the organization’s training programs, their evolution and the establishment of the new National Center for Advanced Payments and Identity Security , an expansion suppo...
Mar 16, 2016•26 min
Blockchain. Is it the most revolutionary technology in value exchange ever or just the latest fintech buzzword enjoying its peak on the hype cycle? Or both? These young techniques are undergoing swift evolution, going from bitcoin and money transfer into new use cases such as identity management. There’s still truth in the cartoon’s joke that, online, no one knows you’re a dog. The challenge goes beyond discerning hacker activity from the permitted. It’s also about the release of just the data n...
Feb 03, 2016•25 min
Anyone even vaguely conscious during Sunday afternoon football games has seen adverts for Visa Checkout, that shopping cart checkout assistant the card network is encouraging everyone—cardholders, issuers, and merchants—to adopt. Visa is not alone. MasterCard’s MasterPass and American Express Checkout are similar product offerings all meant to add convenience and security to the merchant’s checkout flow. These checkout assistants—you could even stretch the definition a bit and think of them as w...
Jan 18, 2016•24 min
