Bringing electronic payment capability to small merchants is a major hurdle for multiple developing economies. In this Payments on Fire podcast with Glenbrook co-founder Allen Weinberg and George Peabody, we discuss merchant enablement in markets reliant on 2G wireless and feature phones. We take a deeper look at India’s payment evolution in particular. Allen’s observations come from his recent work in India and the insights into payment system success factors he’s developed. Take a listen!

Bringing payments and financial services to those of us with a tenuous connection to the banking system is the goal of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. FinLab, a joint effort by the CFSI and JPMorgan Chase, is a five year effort, now in its third year, that’s using a competition for funding and business support to broaden American financial services options.

When nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 ready money, better financial management tools can help. Join FinLab’s Managing Director, Ryan Falvey and Glenbrook’s George Peabody as they discuss the FinLab mission, its process, successes, and what Ryan hopes to see next.

The term identity gets used a lot whenever internet payments and security are discussed. Knowing who we transact with is still the knotty problem. Strong authentication is required. Identity verification is required, too. A means of sharing the fruits of that work among the parties involved, especially those taking on risk, could save everyone a lot of cost and effort. That’s the notion behind federated identity and other means of securely sharing identity attributes without undermining privacy.

That tall order is the subject of this podcast with Andre Boysen, Chief Identity Officer of SecureKey. Join George and Andre as they talk about trust on the internet, SecureKey’s approach, and the company’s use of blockchain technology via a partnership with IBM.

Want to know what it takes to to stay smart in payments? Take a listen to Russ Jones, the Partner in Charge of Glenbrook’s Payments Boot Camp program. Russ gives a look behind the scenes, talks over the boot camp’s evolution, and how it stays forward looking in what’s become a fast changing industry. Over 13,000 payments professionals have experienced the Payments Boot Camp Russ talks about in this Payments on Fire podcast. 

Sometimes a change in direction is the way forward. Network aspirant Dwolla has recently pivoted its work toward the product and development teams inside financial institutions. Instead of being a system operator, Dwolla now offers a broad set of APIs designed for those FIs to take advantage of the ACH’s overnight and Same Day ACH services. Dwolla’s shift also comes as the company and the US anticipates the impact of new immediate funds transfer systems Zelle, The Clearing House, and likely others.

Take a listen to this conversation with Jordan Lampe, Dwolla’s Director of Communications and Policy Affairs, and Glenbrook's George Peabody as they discuss the Federal Reserve Faster Payments Payments Task Force Steering Committee, use cases for Same Day ACH, and more.

Turning money movement into a core capability of the internet is the guiding principle of Circle Internet Financial. Not an easy task. While technical issues abound, regulatory and business hurdles pose larger challenges.

Join Payments on Fire host George Peabody and Circle’s co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville for this discussion on Circle’s geographic expansion, its recent shift in bitcoin support, and its development of Spark, a blockchain-based open source smart contract platform optimized to share and store payments meta-data including exchange rates, KYC details, identity, etc.

One of last year's most anticipated advances in fraud management was the final release of EMVCo’s 3D Secure 2.0 protocol specification. Designed to take a risk-based approach to authorization and lower the checkout friction of its predecessor, 3DS2 will be a new tool in the growing anti-fraud arsenal.

One of its supporters and a service provider that’s been closely tied to 3D Secure is CardinalCommerce. Cardinal, now a new addition to Visa’s arsenal with its recent acquisition, has been working with the risk-based approach for quite awhile. Take a listen to Visa’s Mark Nelson and Mike Keresman and Tim Sherwin of CardinalCommerce in this discussion about 3DS2, card network mandates, Cardinal’s acquisition by Visa, and when the market will see 3DS2 solutions.

In e-commerce and mobile commerce the problem of false declines is significant, especially during the holidays. Issuers decline transactions that online merchants approve. And vice versa. In other words, the necessary process of sorting out fraud from good transactions catches good transactions with the bad. This poor decision making means merchants lose the sale and the issuer its transaction fees.

In this Payments on Fire podcast, Glenbrook's George Peabody discusses the false decline issue with Ethoca’s CMO Keith Briscoe as well as the company’s program to encourage more merchants and issuers to take advantage of its shared data service. 

Multiple organizations have emerged to address different aspects of security, privacy, and identity. In this Payments on Fire Podcast, Glenbrook’s George Peabody speaks with Craig Spiezle, Executive Director of the Online Trust Alliance, an organization bringing together privacy and security best practices for a range of industries, including payments. Take a listen to this conversation about the security challenges ahead, especially around the Internet of Things.