Payments on Fire™

Payments on Fire Episode 21, originally aired: June 15, 2015 Network tokenization - the promised land of payments. Like most promised lands, the journey there is epic and, well, hard. One question we hear from our clients, workshop participants, and the folks in our Merchant Round Table is: Are we there yet? We dug into our vault to understand the journey - where we started and how far we’ve come. We found Episode 21, when George Peabody and Russ Jones discussed network tokenization (aka issuer tokenization, aka EMV tokenization). This conversation is an excellent episode to get the history, essential workings, and context for an important, if not long in the tooth, technology reshaping how payment credentials are propagated and managed in our digital era. Yvette will be catching up with Russ and Chris Uriarte to discuss recent developments in network tokenization on an upcoming podcast - and try to decide when we’ll arrive at our destination.

While payment facilitation has opened up a new segment of service providers within the payments industry, embedded finance is opening up the world of payments to every company. The allure of embedded finance is rooted in the deepening of the customer relationship through offering meaningful financial products. This deeper relationship comes in the form of increased customer loyalty - or “stickiness” - and new revenue streams accretive to the company’s core business. This is all well and good, but payments and financial products are regulated, complex, and often require support at the critical moment of the transaction or afterward. How is customer support evolving to meet the needs of companies and customers in the world of embedded finance? How should providers be thinking about customer support?  In this episode, Yvette sits down with Ashley Isenberg, VP of Revenue and Strategic Partnerships at Finix and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond to explore the ongoing evolution of customer support in the payments industry.  

With all its associated technologies (neural networks, symbolic reasoning, search algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, expert systems, and more), AI has been evolving in universities, the government, and corporations for decades. But only those with a keen interest in this technology have been paying close attention to its progress. Meanwhile, a chatbot helped you when you contacted support. Or you used Alexa or Siri to answer a question, play some music, turn on your lights, buy something online, pay your bills, or tell a joke. In our lives, we have caught glimpses of AI’s potential but no clear line of sight as to how powerful the underpinning technologies have become or how quickly they are evolving. With the unveiling of ChatGPT and similar tools, we are now face to face with the AI era. In his book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman says, "Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability to do these things, and with greater breadth and scope. Within a few years, this copilot will fall somewhere between useful and essential to most professionals and many other sorts of workers. Without GPT-4, they’ll be slower, less comprehensive, and working at a great disadvantage. The Payments Industry is interesting because it is constantly changing, and technology has always been a significant change agent. For decades, networks, processors, PSPs, merchants, and financial institutions have invested in technology to increase adoption, create new services, manage risk, and accelerate initiation, clearing, and settlement.  In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Frank Young, a 35-year veteran of the fintech space, and Glenbrook’s Russ Jones to think about how AI might transform the payments industry and how organizations should mobilize for this transformation. It’s time to start talking about this topic seriously - with each other - and not just asking ChatGPT.   

Payments on Fire Episode 1, originally aired: September 7, 2014 Innovation in the payments industry is a funny thing. Sometimes payments lead. Sometimes technology leads. Increasingly around the world, regulators lead. In preparing for an upcoming podcast on AI, Yvette thought about Glenbrook’s first Payments on Fire podcast episode - in 2014 - on Bitcoin. So we’re pulling it from the vault to share.   If you have ever wanted to be a fly on the wall while industry thought leaders contemplated the implications of something new, here’s your chance. This is eavesdropping at its best - and a great reminder that innovation and disruption are not just about technical feasibility.  

In Part 2, Yvette Bohanan continues the conversation from Episode 206 with the commercial practice team at Glenbrook. We cover some new topic areas, including banks, risk and fraudsters, and the investment community in this macroeconomic environment. Listen in to see what we're watching, where we might see some blind spots, or where the next set of curveballs will be coming as we get into the back half of 2023. 

Russ Jones chats with Yvette Bohanan about Glenbrook's new Payments Boot Camp Intensive workshop. Listen in to hear more details including agenda highlights, workshop format, and who should attend.

Each month, Justin Pituch recaps the news that got Glenbrook talking in his Payments Post. In May, he observed a burst of news highlighting new technology reshaping how American consumers make purchases and verify their identity. At the same time, other articles underscored how American consumers are struggling to fulfill financial obligations against the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty. In this Fanning the Flames episode, Justin and Yvette Bohanan consider these forces and potential implications for the future of payments.

Some people know Glenbrook for our Payments Boot Camp workshops, some know us for our book - Payment Systems in the US - while others know us for this podcast. Interestingly, while we do all of those things, we are, in fact, a consulting firm. A consulting firm that believes educating industry professionals is a great way to make the industry stronger. Our consulting practice gives us a front-row seat to stakeholders across the value chain. Whether they are in start-ups or central banks, we hear what’s on their minds every day and have the opportunity to help them tackle challenges, identify growth opportunities, and instigate change. In this episode, Yvette Bohanan sits down with Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Drew Edmond to take stock of payment industry trends as we reach the halfway point of 2023, to hear their perspectives on what’s hot, what’s not, and what are they watching as we venture into the second half of the year.  

In payments, as it is in life, a simple question is often wrapped in complexity. The complexity of the payments acceptance landscape, with an increasing number of stakeholders and technology providers, changing regulations and rules, and Issuers implementing new authentication and authorization mechanisms - any one or a combination of these could lead to major and minor impacts to the operational and financial performance of a business. And while this has been the case for several decades, we find ourselves in a macroeconomic environment that requires us to find operational efficiencies, which places the payments team under increasing pressure to maximize the number of successful payments, lower the cost of accepting payments, and support customer acquisition to drive incremental revenue. Long story short, these “simple questions” are being asked more often and at higher organizational levels. Why are simple questions hard to answer? Yvette Bohanan talks with Klas Bäck, Founder and CEO of Pagos Solutions, and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond.  

In the US, fast payments discussions have centered around person-to-person, business-to-business, bill payment, and digital wallet funding in/out scenarios. In 2022, RTP® processed $72B, the majority of this volume communing from PayPal and Venmo funding activity. Zelle has reached a highly respectable $629B in person-to-person payments, traversing into “person-to-sole proprietor” territory. ACH, the workhorse of bulk payments is, as we say “hotter than ever” with Same Day ACH seeing an 86% year-over-year increase growing from $943B to $1.758B annual volume. But what about consumer-to-business purchases? Is there an opportunity for the US to see momentum in open banking and fast payments move into the commerce domain as they are in India, Brazil, and other countries? What will it take - and are we ready - to “pay by bank”? Yvette Bohanan welcomes Eric Shoykhet, CEO & Co-Founder of Link Financial Technologies, to this episode to share his thoughts on the topic.