Payments on Fire™

In 2025, Glenbrook's Drew Edmond hosted a series on payments performance optimization - how merchants get more good transactions approved and lose fewer customers to failed payments. Since then, Drew has spent most of his time inside subscription businesses doing exactly that work.

This episode is an accumulation of what he has learned about how optimization actually works today. And here's the short version - for subscription payments and for subscription businesses, an individual transaction success depends on a lot more than just the payment.

Tune in as Drew outlines a data-forward approach that spans every environment a payment touches, highlighted by clips from previous guests from the payments performance optimization series.

About a year ago, we chatted with with Tim Chiodo of UBS and Chris Kim of Capital Group about the investment side of payments. It's been a pretty volatile 12-months in the equity market since then - well-timed for Bryan Derman to welcome Tim back to the podcast and catch up on the market factors playing into the payments space.

Listen in as they recap the performance of payments stocks, dive into the e-commerce market, provide perspective on the card networks, discuss merchant acquiring growth opportunities, and finish up with a lightning round on emerging technology.

Transcript & links to charts from the episode can be found here on our website.

As with many institutions, the European Central Bank is considering how to modernize central bank money. One way to do this is to issue a retail CBDC or central bank digital currency. This would make a digital version of central bank money available to the public. A retail CBDC would complement the physical form of widely available central bank money that we know and love today, which is physical cash or banknotes.

Many central banks around the world have been exploring a retail CBDC, and the live examples include Nigeria, China, India, and the Caribbean, specifically the Bahamas, which was the first country to issue retail CBDC, and Jamaica. The ECB has also for years been researching and exploring this topic and is preparing to issue a pilot of its retail CBDC, the digital euro, in the second half of 2027.

In this episode, Nicola Branzoli, Head of Division for the Digital Euro Regulation, Research, and Technical Support at the Banca d'Italia, joins Glenbrook's Ashley Lannquist and Simon Skinner for an in-depth exploration of the digital euro. Listen in as they cover the objectives and value proposition, design choices and pilot details, and what the digital euro means in the broader European payment context.

2026 is a milestone year for Glenbrook as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the firm. We also find ourselves airing the 300th episode of our Payments on Fire podcast - founded by George Peabody in 2014, nurtured by Yvette Bohanan, and now continued on through the hosting efforts of most of the team.

We thought there would be no better way to mark the 12 year achievement - and pay respect to what George and Yvette built - than to revisit the journey with clips from the first 299 episodes. From early episodes on digital currency and AI, to fast payments evolution and financial inclusion efforts (and how could we leave out tokenization), listen in as Bryan Derman and Jill Wurst guide you through significant moments in the podcast's history.

Glenbrook's Chris Uriarte and Samantha Gordon continue their global payments regulation series with Scott McInnes, Partner at Bird & Bird, focusing on the European Union.

Tune in as they explore the EU's highly regulated landscape, the challenges of inconsistent national enforcement across 27 member states, and developments on current regulatory topics:

• Payment Services Directive - PSD2 to PSD3 evolution
• Payment Services Regulation (PSR) objectives and adoption timeline
• Digital euro goals and requirements
• European Digital Identity Wallet framework and ambitions
• SEPA Instant obligations
• Upcoming BNPL regulation
• Apple NFC access and wallet competition
• Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) implications for agentic commerce

Kicking off a series of regulation-related episodes, Duncan Douglass, payments attorney and Partner at Alston & Bird LLP, joins Chris Uriarte and Samantha Gordon to turn the confusing and sometimes tedious topic of US payments regulation into an entertaining and enlightening update.

The conversation begins with who actually regulates payments in the US and how US payments oversight differs from the UK and EU, then flows into developments on current regulatory topics:

• Ongoing Reg II/Durbin litigation relating to interchange
• The Fed's 2023 proposed debit cap reduction
• Latest preliminary approval of the Visa/Mastercard merchant settlement
• Credit Card Competition Act's status
• Illinois's IFPA delay, and practical challenges of state-by-state rules
• Surcharging, and operational complexities across network rules and state laws
• GENIUS Act stablecoin issues
• Early rule questions around agentic commerce

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.