The digital marketplace model brings together buyers and sellers and, frequently, handles the money and payouts to the sellers. As my guest today has determined, digital infrastructure, e-commerce usage, competition, and workforce characteristics influence a country’s ability to establish a flourishing marketplace component to the economy. This marketplace economic model is a useful one enabling, among other use cases, the gig economy. Adopted in countries like China, the US, Canada, the UK, Aus...
Mar 21, 2019•34 min
The business of merchant services continues to undergo two forms of transformation. First, the merchant services businesses, either as acquiring banks or via non-bank acquirers, has undergone massive consolidation over the last five years and more. Fiserv’s takeover of First Data, announced on January 16, is just the latest example. The second sea change is the expansion of products and services these entities deliver. What was a fairly innovation-averse industry has become, under the competitiv...
Mar 15, 2019•35 min
This Stuff is Hard As the remote payments domain (think in-app and browser-based payment transactions) continues to grow at around 15% a year, that growing number means the size and scale of fraud losses are going to increase. And they have - in both absolute terms and as a percentage of overall transaction volume. That also means rising chargeback rates for many merchants. Rising fraud in the online world is also a result of better security technology in the physical world. While EMV chip cards...
Feb 22, 2019•43 min
Ecommerce fraud rates are rising and that means more cardholders are seeing unauthorized charges on their accounts. The cardholder remedy is to call either the merchant or the issuer to flag the problem. If the cardholder turns to the issuer to resolve the problem, the remedy is often an expensive chargeback for the merchant and a generally lousy experience for everyone. Ecommerce Merchant Pain Ecommerce merchants have invested heavily in fraud detection tools because in the remote payment domai...
Jan 24, 2019•43 min•Ep. 85
Fraud prevention today is about how quickly we can separate good customers from questionable ones and, for those doubtful transactions, use the right set of tools and data sources to optimize speed, costs, and fraud losses. When it comes to fraud prevention, it turns out that data is key. No revelation there, but how we manipulate it, gather it, and assure its provenance is undergoing major change. What would be a revelation to fraud managers of a decade ago is the unbelievable amount of data an...
Dec 26, 2018•46 min
Payment Innovation Moves to the Core When we conduct our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp, our first graphic illustrates the three essential steps in every transaction - initiation, funding, and completion. When looked at through the lens of of the past decade most innovation has been in initiation. Consider: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, QR codes. The list is long of ways to kick off a transaction. Funding is all about where the money comes from. Usually a bank account, often a wallet holding money...
Nov 15, 2018•44 min
Restaurant payments is a complex area especially for those companies serving the mid-sized and large restaurant operator. They have different needs that extend well beyond payment acceptance but even that is a highly variable concern. Ever notice that we pay differently depending upon the type of restaurant we’re in? It’s always been walk up and pay the central server at McDonalds. Applebees uses Presto table top devices to speed table turns, upset desserts (“that lava cake sure looks good”) and...
Nov 13, 2018•30 min
For those of you who didn't make it to Money20/20 and want to hear the latest on The Clearing House's Real Time Payments Network (RTP), take a listen to this update conversation with Steve Ledford, SVP at The Clearing House for the RTP Network. A year ago, The Clearing House got out of the gate with its Real Time Payments Network, a wholly new payments system based on the push payment model. A lot has changed - more banks have integrated into the system and many more are in process. By the end o...
Oct 25, 2018•46 min
The payment industry’s responses to ongoing payment security are many. We have procedural approaches and technical ones. For example, we are requiring merchants to attest to their compliance with PCI security standards that themselves include procedural requirements. Technical solutions are also called out by PCI and are, of course, being applied across the ecosystem. Encryption of payment data in flight is one approach. In the physical POS world, semi-integrated POS terminals connect directly t...
Oct 18, 2018•30 min
In the US, there’s the automatic assumption that payment cards and perhaps PayPal are the way to pay online. But if you’re an ecommerce merchant trying to sell in the Netherlands, you’d better support the domestic system known as iDeal. Connectivity into domestic payment systems is an important and complex issue. There are over 150 such systems across dozens of countries around the world. While not all are important to a given merchant, most are important to the acquirers and payment service pro...
Oct 05, 2018•35 min
Knowing who you’re dealing with online is critical if you’re taking transaction risk. Digital identity is tough. To address that challenge - and it is a challenge - relying parties, those who take on risk, employ two broad categories of technology: active tools that require user interaction and passive network-based approaches. When the user is required to explicitly provide identifying information, we use the interactive approach. The merchant or lender or website owner asks for user IDs, passw...
Sep 13, 2018•33 min
Alexa. Siri. Cortana. We’re talking to or at our machines. I walk into my office and say “Hey Google, what’s the weather?” or “Hey Google, when’s my first appointment?” When I’m driving in a strange town, it’s “hey Google, navigate to the [fill in the blank] hotel.” This kind of hands-free access to information is hugely helpful and hugely popular. But there’s a long way to go toward a general purpose voice interface for every task we want to accomplish. That said, we’re getting there. In this c...
Sep 12, 2018•27 min
During the Glenbrook Payment Book Camp we make clear that national payments systems are domestic by definition. Each country has its own set of systems to effect payments. We point out that national payment systems differ in many of their details. Regulation, operating rules, governance, ownership, technology, and more are highly variable. At the same time, we also point out that major components are generally similar. An overnight, batch-based system for low-cost, low-value retail payments and ...
Jul 19, 2018•30 min
In this second discussion with First Data execs, George and Scott MacKay, Vice President, Strategic Solutions talk digital commerce in the automative space, both at the fuel pump and in the Connected Car. The importance of full stack security, whether it's sole sourced or the result of an integration effort, to successful deployment of mobile commerce is a theme here. Enabling the mobile experience at the fuel pump is complex. Petro sellers have a lot of legacy gear and the cost of upgrading tha...
Jun 04, 2018•25 min
In this, the first of a two-part podcast series with First Data executives, Ajay Guru, VP of Merchant Fraud Solutions at First Data and George discuss the impact of fraud on the merchant, what the merchant has to do to manage it, and the classes of tools and techniques available to mitigate fraud. Ajay addresses machine learning technology's remarkable ability to identify anomalies and makes candid remarks on the necessity of human analysis to determine whether these anomalies are indeed fraud. ...
Jun 04, 2018•30 min
Online trust requires a context-based understanding of who we transact with. Attributes about us are needed to build that trust but in many transaction contexts we share more than we need to. To pick a simple example, the law says you must be 21 to buy alcoholic beverages but our current method of proof is to show our driver's license, an unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Why show that creepy barkeep where you live when you only need to prove you were born before 1997? In this wid...
May 08, 2018•31 min
This episode of Payments on Fire covers two topics - payments in Atlanta and the essential challenge of online authentication and identity. May in Atlanta - Fintech South and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp Everyone in the payments industry knows that Atlanta is a hotbed of activity. Coming shortly to Atlanta are two fintech-focused events that will add to the goings-on. The Fintech South conference takes place on May 7 and 8. With great speakers - and great sponsors like Glenbrook and the Technolo...
Apr 17, 2018•35 min
The rise of Chinese mobile payment systems is the top global mobile payments story of the last few years. Alipay and WeChat Pay serve hundreds of millions of users with payments, loyalty programs, merchant coupons, and more. QR codes are used to initiate many of these interactions especially within the point of sale (POS) domain. When there isn’t a legacy payment infrastructure in place, software is easier, and cheaper, to deploy than the hardware-reliant approaches used for card-based transacti...
Apr 13, 2018•29 min
Mid-market financial institutions have enormously strong relationships with their banking customers. But their size makes home grown IT difficult because it is simply too hard, and too costly, to meet all the B2B finance needs of their enterprise customers. The answer, of course, is deeper integration to third party software systems like SAP, Oracle, JDA and the growing set of fintech providers brining point solutions to these institutions. But that’s no simple task. These FIs often run on legac...
Jan 24, 2018•33 min
“Digital cash” has been a dream of the internet age for, well, almost the entire internet age. That goal requires instant payment settlement. It’s more than just sending a message that a payment has happened; it means the money has actually moved. In this wide ranging conversation with Laurence Cooke, founder and CEO of nanopay , he discusses the platform his firm has built to move value between parties in both real-time and, when necessary, offline modes. More distributed than blockchain system...
Jan 19, 2018•27 min
Episode 69 is all about how the PCI Security Standards Council is responding to changes in security technology and how it is expanding its role and technology coverage across important new geographies. If payment security is on your screen, join Glenbrook’s George Peabody , partner and host of Payments on Fire , and Troy Leach, CTO for the PCI Security Standards Council as they discuss standards under development like PIN Entry on COTS , other new tools to mitigate data breach risk, and the Coun...
Dec 28, 2017•38 min
Digital identity is a crisp sounding term that belies a complex layer of concepts. There is identity proofing. Identify verification. Identity assurance. Each addresses one element of the many questioned raised by digital identity. How does a bank really know the digital presence at its banking portal is associated with the accountholder? How can you, as an individual, release only the amount of data necessary to satisfy the parties to the transaction? We share more than we need to. I still get ...
Dec 20, 2017•36 min
Voice is the natural user interface and the robots are coming to take it on. Enabled by high volume consumer devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple’s Siri and powered by artificial intelligence engines like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri, we are headed toward making voice-enabled commerce and payments a common experience. Russ Jones is Glenbrook ’s “tech whisperer,” an expert observer of tech evolution and how it applies to payments. Join Russ and George as they discuss...
Dec 11, 2017•31 min
Payment innovation runs at multiple speeds. Changes in how a payment is initiated happen almost every day. Payments infrastructure change is a lot slower. But it’s happening. Nudged forward by the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payment Task Force, we are seeing the launch of the first entirely new payment system in decades. Called Real Time Payments (RTP) the new system switched its first real-time payment on November 13, 2017. Built entirely around the rich payment messaging standard ISO 20022, we ha...
Nov 30, 2017•50 min
Once upon a time, text messaging systems didn't interoperate. But when they did, usage skyrocketed. Many of the world's mobile money payment systems still operate within that old "walled garden" model, limiting the ability of citizens in areas like Southern Africa to send money home to family, pay utility bills, and, most important, enjoy the benefits of an national economy that is payments enabled. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sees today's limited interconnection of payment systems a...
Oct 20, 2017•37 min
The intersection of new tech, faster payments capabilities, and forward looking regulation is enabling significant innovation in B2B, and consumer, payment services in the UK and EU. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Myles Stephenson, CEO of business payments platform provider Modulr , as they discuss how modern tech and updated rules have created opportunities for fintech service providers. The challenges to incumbent banks are only getting bigger....
Oct 19, 2017•27 min
Payments standards typically operate deep within a payment system, invisible to most of us. But before long a new standard for web browsers will touch us all. Known as the Payment Request API, it is one of the newer projects of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Supported by browser builders Mozilla, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more, this new API should simplify web payments for consumers and merchants alike. Join the W3C project leader Ian Jacobs and Glenbrook’s George Peabody as they discus...
Sep 28, 2017•26 min
If you’re planning on attending Money/2020 in October, the Glenbrook team will be there in force. This short, not entirely serious, podcast previews the sessions we are leading there on two of the hottest topics around: B2B payments and the faster or real-time payments systems coming to the U.S....
Sep 14, 2017•7 min
We all know that the evolution of payments systems in the U.S. is accelerating. That’s why Glenbrook has just published the third edition of our book, Payments Systems in the U.S. - Third Edition: A Guide for the Payments Professional , the definitive guide to the how and, in particular, the why of our multiple payments systems. The third edition addresses that evolution through updated examples and, unique to this edition, a focus on payments innovation in all three payments phases: initiation,...
Aug 29, 2017•18 min
Interchange is fundamental to open look card system economics and a mystery to many, especially to merchants who must pay it but don’t perceive any benefit from it. It’s a non-optional component of what the merchant pays to accept cards. It’s one element of the merchant discount fee. Despite the stubborn fact of it, there are ways for some merchants to make sure they pay as low a rate as possible. Join Angelo Grecco of CardConnect (now a part of First Data) and Glenbrook’s George Peabody for a c...
Aug 24, 2017•29 min
