Payments on Fire™

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.

While “paying into” a company comes with nuance and complexity, it’s really nothing compared to what is involved when a business attempts to make an outgoing payment. 

Most of us don’t think very much about these “payouts”. It’s been the domain of ERP software for decades, often an asterisk mentioning “supported payments”. Whether you are talking about B2B payments, expense reimbursements, or mass disbursements to gig workers, payouts started having a moment a few years ago. 

Manish Vrishaketu, Chief Customer and Operations Officer at Tipalti, joins us for this episode to  dive into why payouts have been overlooked for so long, what makes them challenging to master, and what is happening that may make things better and easier for a “niche” specialization in our industry that happens to be incredibly important for every company on the planet.

It’s September 2024, and this month, we’re focusing on business-to-business payments. B2B payments are difficult because so much information must be exchanged for them to process efficiently. But there’s more to it than that.

B2B payments are many things to many people - for finance teams, they are “payables”; for gig economy companies, they are “payouts”; for providers, like insurance companies, they are “claims payments.” The list goes on - and within each of these sub-categories, there are niggling nuances that are requirements for making these payments streamlined and affordable.

For today’s episode, we pulled a favorite from our vault - number 146, a discussion between George Peabody and Robin Gandhi. Since this aired in March of 2021, Robin has moved to a post as Chief Product Officer at Nium, and TripActions has rebranded to Navan. But the underlying ideas discussed regarding B2B are still important - and this idea of multi-player fintech and what it means for B2B payments is quite relevant.

The introduction of real-time payments in the U.S. market has been unfolding for several years now, but it seemed to pick up momentum in the last year as FedNow came to market. We now have over 1,000 banks live with real-time payments (at least for receiving) and a solid majority of transaction accounts are now reachable via FedNow, The Clearing House’s RTP system, or both.

We wanted to understand whether we might be reaching the elusive “tipping point” for real-time payments in the U.S. and which players and what kind of use cases might be driving the growth. So, we turned to an old and respected friend of Glenbrook to share a perspective.

In this episode, we go deep on the state of real-time with Dimitri Dadiomov. Dimitri is CEO at Modern Treasury, which gives him a birds-eye view of transaction trends as his company connects major corporations and leading-edge fintech platforms to a growing set of major banks in order to enable and streamline the origination of many money movement use cases.

Sometimes an episode sticks with me. It just keeps coming back in different ways. Reading an article, having a conversation, even watching TV can make me stop and reflect on a recording. This is exactly what has been happening since we sat down with Dr. David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to talk about fraud.

As always, we covered a lot of ground in this episode. As you might expect, we talked fraud trends. What you might not expect is a conversation, most enlightening, on the psychology of fraud and those who perpetrate it.

Many thanks to David for sharing his insights on the dark web, on this podcast and regularly on LinkedIn. If you are not following him there, you should be.

Last but not least, a shout out to Georgia State University and the work they are doing in their Evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group. Good stuff.

In this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire, Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Russ Jones discuss Mastercard's bold June announcement to eliminate manual card number entry for eCommerce transactions in Europe by 2030, and explore the challenges and necessary steps to achieve this goal.

The conversation centers around three core components from the announcement: tokenization, streamlined guest checkouts, and authentication via passkeys. Tune in to hear more about the mechanics of these technologies, their industry adoption, and implications for merchants, issuers, and cardholders.

Authentication and identification are top of mind for payments professionals battling fraud these days. We’ve made progress over the past two decades in managing payments risk in the digital era, but fraud continues to evolve and often seems to be one or several steps ahead. The classic cat-and-mouse game has moved to a point where “Are you really you?” and “Should you have access to this account?” are the questions that are both increasingly critical and elusive to answer.

In this episode, we take the long view, talking with Ori Eisen, CEO and Founder of Trusona. We reflect on what the payments industry has gotten right, the current challenges, and the future of authentication and identity. And, to pay attention to the here and now, we asked Ori to share his best practice tips for implementing passkeys.