“Payments Performance Optimization” is a pretty broad term, and it might mean different things to different people. 

In a series of Payments on Fire episodes this year, Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond will be talking to guests who are approaching payments optimization from a variety of different angles, with a focus on primarily online, card not present merchants. 

At the end of the day, a merchant wants the maximum number of good transactions to be authorized successfully. It sounds so simple. But is anything in payments really simple?

In this episode, Oban MacTavish, CEO and Co-founder of Spade, joins Drew to explore this issue by focusing on merchant data, and how issuers make decisions about card transactions.

As legal and regulatory restrictions have become relaxed in recent years, we’ve been noting the increasing prevalence of surcharges on payment cards here in the U.S. 

Perhaps it was inevitable that the practice would become more commonplace in our market, which is known around the world for relatively high rates of card interchange and a relatively light touch in financial services regulation.

Surcharging is a tricky issue with a lot of different stakeholder perspectives to consider. In this episode, Emily Tsitrian, co-founder of Yeeld, joins Bryan Derman and Drew Edmond to share  industry insights on this emerging practice and how businesses can best implement surcharging while staying compliant.

In 2024, to our great delight, we had a conversation with David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink. We’re fortunate to welcome David back for a quarterly series this year to check in on payments fraud writ large - to better understand what’s happening and why.

Listen in to this episode as Yvette and David discuss the evolution and resurgence of check fraud, the increasing sophistication of fraud rings targeting banks and the government, and the adaptation of new technologies, including Generative AI, for criminal activity.

In this episode, Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward, joins Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman to share insights on the evolving partner banking space, the importance of risk and compliance frameworks, and Pathward's mission of financial inclusion. Tune in as they also discuss potential policy and regulatory changes due to implications of major discrepancies in the banking-as-a-service arrangement between fintech platform Synapse and its banking partners. 

In this episode, Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones join Yvette Bohanan to discuss Glenbrook’s focus on payments education and share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34,000 (and counting) payments geeks. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes insights from their workshop experiences and highlights from the latest offering, On-Demand Learning, as Glenbrook continues to evolve payments education with the changing industry landscape.

Booshan Rengachari, CEO of Finzly, joins Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry and Simon Skinner to discuss how software, fast payments, and open banking are reshaping the banking industry and the way we think about financial services.

Tune in as they cover the challenges of modernizing legacy banking systems, the rise of fast payments, and the potential of open banking to integrate banking services into everyday life. The episode also explores fraud prevention in fast payment systems and the evolving role of banks amidst competition from fintech companies.

The Glenbrook partners reflect on key trends and challenges in the payments industry that shaped 2024 - from generative AI, open banking, the evolving regulatory landscape, and the rise of fast payment systems worldwide. And you can't get the Glenbrook team in a "room" without discussing ongoing fraud implications, orchestration in merchant payments, and the progress of tokenization. Tune in to hear insights from our industry experts on these themes and more as we wrap up the year and look towards 2025.

Real end-to-end testing requires real-world transactions. Sometimes that’s not too difficult to do if you are implementing payments in your own country. But step outside your border, and it gets a bit harder. 

People new to payments turn to logical solutions when faced with this problem. Can you call the acquirer? Won’t they have test accounts for us to use? (Probably not.) Can’t we just drip a few transactions through with a few live customers to see how it goes? (Sure, but you may wait a long time to run through all the scenarios you would like to see - and there usually isn’t patience for that in a launch environment.)

It’s tough, but don’t be discouraged. Mercifully, a subspeciality of payment providers has set out to solve this problem. And that is the focus of this episode.

Steve Semelsberger, CEO of Testlio, joins Yvette Bohanan and Drew Edmond to discuss the evolution of quality management alongside payments testing.

Payments and treasury are two sides of the same coin. Payments teams are responsible for the customer journey - payments into a company and sometimes disbursements to sellers, app developers, content creators, or vendors. Their role usually includes working with banks and other providers to ensure money moves into and out of the company’s accounts correctly and efficiently. 

Treasurers are responsible for managing cash, ensuring the efficient flow of funds, and ensuring that things like currency conversion are not eroding margins. Fintechs often have those goals and are usually searching for a bank sponsor who understands what they are trying to build. 

Debopama Sen, Head of Payments at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, joins us for this episode to explore how treasury and payments professionals can collaborate on opportunities presented by the evolving payments landscape. 

Yvette Bohanan and Russ Jones celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the announcement of Apple Pay by reflecting on its origins, challenges, and successes. The episode highlights key features like tokenization, encryption, and biometric authentication, emphasizing Apple Pay's focus on security, privacy, and convenience. Tune in to take a look back at Apple Pay’s significant impact on the payments industry and a look forward to its continued expansion.

One of the existential challenges remaining in payments is the need to accurately authorize transactions conducted online. While markets like the EU, UK and India have mandated strong customer authentication for online transactions, the U.S. is the largest market where such stepped-up authentication remains optional. Only a very small portion of eCommerce purchases utilize the 3-D Secure protocol due to lingering concerns about imposing friction and delay on a consumer base that thrives on convenience and fully understands its chargeback rights.

The Payments Performance team at Stripe recently published a blog post noting that in their controlled testing of 3-D Secure, the impact on approval rates was negative compared to running similar transactions without additional authentication. We were surprised by those results and wondered what the card issuing community would make of that counter-intuitive finding.

In this episode of Payments on Fire, we decided to get both sides of the story from two good friends of Glenbrook. Amandeep Batra from Stripe joined us to provide the merchant perspective; Dewald Nolte of Entersekt, a leader provider of 3-D Secure Access Control Server solutions joined us to offer the issuer perspective.