Drew Edmond and Chris Uriarte chat with Nikhil Konduru, Chief Commercial Officer at Lithic, to discuss modern card issuing infrastructure and where the market is headed.

They break down the issuing stack and discuss issuer-side tools to improve authorization outcomes, reduce fraud and servicing costs, and increase transparency. The conversation also covers cross-border approval and economics, and explores agentic commerce via Nikhil's "Intent Toll Booth" thesis: liability drives control, issuers may demand intent data, and regulatory and network rules may need to evolve.

Going global with your payments strategy requires far more than choosing a single payment provider: companies must weigh local acquiring versus cross-border acquiring, country-by-country payment preferences, entity structure, tax implications, compliance requirements, authorization performance, currency handling, and provider coverage.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte joins Glenbrook colleagues Samantha Gordon, Simon Skinner, and Drew Edmond to explore the complexities and potential benefits for merchants and platforms to consider when expanding payments globally.

The Glenbrook team is taking stock in June 2026 to see how the predictions from our January episode are holding up. Tune in for updates on trending topics in payments, including agentic commerce, stablecoins, cross-border and instant payments, risk and fraud, and the regulatory landscape. We also share insights on the "hot off the presses" news on tokenized deposits and the Visa/Mastercard interchange settlement.

In this episode, Russ Jones welcomes Preston McCaskill, Chief Operating Officer for Zelle, an open loop fast payments network owned and operated by Early Warning Services that moves money directly between two bank accounts in the US.

Listen in as they discuss network's growth into small business payments, the onboarding process for financial institutions, and Zelle's settlement process and alias directory. They also cover expanding use cases like pilots in the bill pay domain, and Early Warning's intent to bring the same trust, speed, and convenience of Zelle to consumer cross-border payments with stablecoins.

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX, to talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions.

Listen in as they cover some of the biggest topics shaping the next phase of global payments, including Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, payment optimization when looking at local payment methods, and perspectives on agentic commerce and stablecoins.

This episode is a follow-up to our 2024 discussion with Stripe and Entersekt on the use of 3-D Secure (3DS) in markets where strong customer authentication is not mandated, particularly the United States. That earlier conversation was grounded in Stripe's analysis of US 3DS transactions and explored a counterintuitive but important finding: when 3DS is deployed selectively in unregulated markets, its presence can become correlated with higher-risk transactions, limiting its effectiveness and in some cases negatively impacting authorization outcomes.

Since that episode, several developments have occurred, including new analysis by Stripe examining 3DS usage and performance in markets where authentication is required by regulation, a substantial increase in the use of EMVCo "network" tokenization, and research and messaging developed by Entersekt regarding the continued use of authentication in conjunction with tokenization.

Chris Uriarte is delighted to welcome back Amandeep Batra from Stripe and Dewald Nolte from Entersekt to address these developments and to explore how authentication and tokenization interact in practice across different regulatory environments.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte speaks with Blake Breathitt, Senior Vice President of Platforms and Financial Services at Adyen, about one of the biggest growth engines in the industry over the past few years - platform payments.

Listen in as they discuss the nature of this interesting segment of the industry, the nuance behind platform payments, and just what's driving this platform payment phenomenon.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte welcomes Keith Briscoe, VP, Advocacy and Education at the Merchant Risk Council, and Allan Shearer, Executive Director, Head of TMT Relationship Management at J.P. Morgan, to focus on the evolution of card network fraud monitoring programs, and in particular, VAMP, Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program, which combines fraud and dispute metrics to better manage risk at both merchant and acquirer levels.

Listen in as the group discusses industry reactions, data transparency and reporting challenges, and implications for enforcement of new thresholds.

Over the past several episodes, we've been building a conversation about how stablecoins are reshaping the global payments landscape. These conversations surfaced something important: this isn't just a technology story. It's a story about access. And there's another critical piece of the puzzle: the infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments actually work on the ground in emerging markets.

In this episode, Chris Maurice, the CEO and co-founder of Yellow Card, joins Drew Edmond to explore how stablecoins are transforming global payments, especially in emerging markets, by addressing liquidity issues, reducing costs, improving compliance transparency, and enabling faster cross-border transactions. Listen in as they highlight the challenges of legacy infrastructure, regulatory evolution, interoperability, and the evolving role of banks and technology platforms in this ecosystem.

It's an auspicious year and month for us at Glenbrook as on March 1, 2026 we mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of our firm, celebrating a quarter-century of pushing forward the frontiers of payments knowledge and strategy and our continuing efforts to build the broader global payments community.

A lot has happened in payments over the last 25 years and there could be no better way to celebrate the progress of the industry and the firm than to talk to the people who played such seminal roles in shaping both: In this episode, we speak with Glenbrook's three founding partners - Carol Coye Benson, Scott Loftesness, and Allen Weinberg.

Listen in as they recall the early days of the firm, discuss how Glenbrook's strategy work expanded to form our education and global practices, consider the evolution of the "payments professional", and reflect on payments industry shifts over their years both in and out of Glenbrook.