In this episode, Rehman Baig, Chief Product Officer at FlexFactor joins Drew Edmond to talk about how FlexFactor is rethinking payments optimization through a Merchant of Record model. For most people in the industry, “Merchant of Record” is usually associated with global tax compliance and marketplaces, not optimization. But FlexFactor is using it to directly address failed payments and auth rate challenges in a way that merchants simply can’t do on their own.

This is a fascinating conversation for anyone working to solve performance issues at scale, especially if your team has ever looked at your decline rate and said, “We’ve tried everything. What now?”

Would you let a software agent, powered by AI, search, select, and complete a purchase on your behalf? Will a merchant be able to tell if there’s a human or robot behind the transaction? What about risk and regulation concerns? 

Russ Jones and Drew Edmond spent some time at the Glenbrook water cooler this week to consider the rapidly emerging topic of agentic commerce and agentic payments. Tune in as they explore different industry perspectives in order to understand the implications of this new technology in the payments ecosystem. 

In a series of episodes, Glenbrook's Joanna Wisniecka will to bring you up to speed on what’s happening globally as countries modernize payment networks and reach individuals and businesses through faster payment systems.

In this episode, Joanna welcomes Sabine Mensah, Deputy CEO of AfricaNenda, a leader in financial inclusion, to explore Africa's dynamic path towards inclusive instant payment systems and the need for continued innovation and collaboration to enable access to financial services for all Africans on the continent by 2030.

Here’s a payments conundrum for you: We now have more ways to authenticate access to an online account or app than ever before. And yet, account takeover (ATO) - basically unauthorized access to an account - is at record levels.

In this episode, Glenbrook’s Yvette Bohanan and Chris Uriarte are joined by Rocky Scales, CEO of IDgo, to explore this multifaceted problem. 

Tune in as they discuss the vulnerabilities in authentication techniques, the need for better consumer education, and how financial institutions and businesses can implement more secure and user-friendly authentication systems to counteract evolving threats from sophisticated fraud methods. 

In this episode, Brant Peterson, Head of Enterprise Product, North America at Worldpay, joins Drew Edmond to talk about payment optimization through the perspective of a payment service provider. Worldpay is one of the world’s largest global PSPs - it processed over 2.5 Trillion Dollars in 2024, which was made up of 50 Billion transactions.

Tune in to hear their perspectives on payment optimization and solutions that PSPs can offer merchant customers to help them improve their approval rates.

With this episode, we are launching a series to explore the current state of global financial inclusion efforts from a payments perspective.

Joanna Wisniecka joins Yvette Bohanan to chat with Michael Wiegand, Director of Inclusive Financial Systems at the Gates Foundation, about the work the Foundation is doing globally and the transformative impact of digital financial inclusion on economies and societies.

Spec co-founder and CEO Nate Kharrl joins Yvette Bohanan on Payments on Fire to dig into some of the tactics and tech that is enabling today's fraud schemes, and how GenAI is redefining the payments risk landscape.

Glenbrook partners Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Simon Skinner jump on a special Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire to give a first take on the  Global Payments acquisition of Worldpay. Tune in to hear their strategic perspective on the deal.

David Maimon, head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, joins Yvette Bohanan for another episode to raise awareness about different fraud tactics and their impacts. 

In this conversation, Yvette and David explore the intricacies and implications of Credit Profile Numbers (CPNs) and synthetic identity fraud, as well as  “zombie debt” and assumed identity fraud.  Listen in to hear the implications of these fraud schemes and how industry professionals can get ahead of them.

“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.