Payments on Fire™

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.

A 2022 report from the CFPB titled Buy Now, Pay Later: Market trends and consumer impacts noted that from 2019 to 2021, the dollar volume of BNPL originations through five lenders surveyed grew by 1,092 percent, from $2 billion to $24.2 billion. BNPL adoption continues, not just in the US but globally, making it one of the most watched payment methods in the world. BNPL's rapid ascent has raised questions about its use: Who is choosing to use BNPL? Is it helpful or harmful to consumers' credit and overall financial well-being? Does it improve financial inclusion? Is it displacing other forms of payment at checkout? A quick online search leads to mixed data points and inconsistent findings, often based on modest sample sizes and extrapolations. To answer these questions, we sat down with Kristin Carlson, Global Products and Analytics Data Scientist, and Zach Tondre, Director of Credit Risk Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who conducted a longitudinal study to obtain insight into these and other questions.

In this episode, we explore the intersection of three significant payment trends: helping small businesses modernize their payment acceptance options, embedded finance, and the consumer lending phenomenon known as Buy Now, Pay Later. We look at the potential market - asking ourselves if there is demand from small businesses and consumers. Then we unpack the opportunity using our BNPL "flywheel" to examine the critical success factors for any BNPL solution. Yvette Bohanan and Debbie Bartoo are joined by Bobby Tzekin, Founder and CEO of Wisetack (and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp alumnus) to examine how technology, consumer and small business demand, and banking are opening up a very large market in the BNPL space - one that has a lot of potential and a lot of nuance.

In this episode, we are taking a closer look at the relationship underpinning much fintech innovation in payments – the fintech, bank, and BaaS trilogy. These 3-way partnerships have spurred innovation, increased access to financial services, and created offerings that appeal to a broad range of businesses and consumers. But in the context of these 3-way partnerships, new and existing risks abound, and relationships between counterparties are not well-established – making this a perfect haven for bad actors. Join us as we explore the current state of payments risk management across these alliances, and discuss the opportunities to make this new landscape safe, strong, and sustainable.

There are a lot of headlines in the payments world. Payments News is Glenbrook's curated news feed of the headlines that matter most every day, but we'll readily acknowledge that it can be a lot to digest. That's why we've introduced Payments Post, a month-end roundup of the news items that got us talking as a team along with some commentary about why we think they're particularly important to the direction of the industry. Glenbrook's Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode to discuss the implications of the top April headlines, which were all related to account-to-account (A2A) payments.