The three major takeaways from stablecoins are that they are fast, global, and low cost. But why are they low cost? Thus began our quest to dive into the economic ecosystem of stablecoins.

When creating material for our workshops or roundtable meetings, we’re always thinking about how to give slides the “Glenbrook treatment” - how do we get past the headlines and down to fundamentals?

In this Fanning the Flames episode, Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan take you behind the scenes to show the "making of" our new stablecoin economics slide. Listen in as they discuss the points of monetization and key revenue streams in the stablecoin value chain, and address questions around practical usage and the evolving landscape.

Take a deeper look at stablecoins (and other industry trends) at our upcoming 1-day Advanced Payments workshop on December 4th in San Francisco. Space is limited - enroll today! 

In this episode of Payments on Fire, Chris Uriarte welcomes Anne Hay, Chief Marketing Officer, and Mike Kaplan, Chief Revenue Officer, from PayNearMe to discuss the evolution and optimization of the payments experience.

They explore the broader concept of payments optimization and how improvements and customization in all aspects of the payments journey can lead to organizations getting paid faster and with a lower total cost of acceptance.

Listen in as they highlight the challenges faced by billers in sectors like healthcare and utilities, and provide insights on the growing importance of alternative payment methods and meeting customers where they are.

In this episode, Bryan Derman welcomes two highly respected members of the investment community who represent the two sides of that business: Tim Chiodo, Managing Director and Lead Analyst for Payments, Processors and Fintech at the global investment bank UBS, and Chris Kim, a public and private market investor who leads payments and fintech activities for Capital International, one of Capital Group’s three equity units.

Tune in as we discuss what’s happening in the market with publicly traded companies, digital wallets, the merchant acquiring space, and private equity. We’ll consider what investors look for in a payments company, explore new flows, and debate the impacts of regulation, stablecoins, and M&A deals before closing out the episode with an investment perspective lightning round.

“97.0% for those whose full personal information was freely available on the darknet” experienced identity theft attempts, according to a key finding in SentiLink’s recent report on the probability of loss. 

In part three of our series on payments fraud trends and tactics, we welcome back David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to dive into how David and his team use a “data-driven” approach in their investigations and how they have applied their research to predict the fraudulent use of identity information. 

Tune in to hear how an evidence-based approach can help your team engage in effective fraud prevention.

In our 2024 Wrap Up episode, we looked into our crystal ball to predict how different payments  themes may evolve in the coming year; however, this industry delivers headlines at a rapid-fire pace (by the way, are you subscribed to Payments News?) and it can be hard to keep up. 

To help you read the tea leaves in the mountains of publications, Yvette Bohanan rounded up Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond for this mid-year update on payments industry trends. Tune in to hear updates and perspectives on the following topics:

• Regulation, including the Durbin Amendment, CCCA, and Click-to-Cancel
• Stablecoins
• Agentic Commerce
• Tokenization
• Fraud and Risk, including Visa's VAMP and passkeys

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by Chanan Lavi, CEO and Co-founder of Kipp, to discuss solutions to one of the most common card decline reasons - non-sufficient funds. Listen in as they talk about how to optimize these transactions and explore the implications for merchants, issuers, and consumers. 

How fast is fast enough? 

When we look at fast payments data across countries, the US comes in pretty far behind in transactions per capita. And on the surface, this makes sense. FedNow is still new, and RTP volumes are relatively low. 

Join Russ Jones and Will Eisler at the Glenbrook water cooler as they debate a looser definition of fast payments, explore challenges for adoption of traditional fast payments systems in the US, and ponder if the US actually has a more advanced and widely adopted “fast” payments ecosystem when we consider how Americans are experiencing faster money movement.

In our third episode in a series to spotlight the latest in global developments in payment systems from a financial inclusion lens, Sonja Kelly, Global Head of Women’s World Banking Institute, joins Joanna Wisniecka to dive into design principles for inclusive digital financial systems and how all end users benefit when design considers the specific needs of women.

Listen in as they discuss barriers to women’s financial inclusion, the critical importance of addressing safety and trust issues, and potential benefits and risks associated with emerging technologies like AI and CBDCs.

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.