Paying invoices and moving funds aross borders for small and medium business (SMB) is expensive and full of uncertainties. How much does the recipient actually get once the transaction is finished? (Hint: it's not always what was sent.)  How long does it take a San Francisco firm to pay an invoice to a contractor in Berlin or Hyderabad? (Hint: it's hard to know exactly when it gets there).

Since there's no such thing as an international wire, entrepreneurs in the virtual currency space have been looking at how these new math-based "rails" can move money faster at lower cost across borders. In this Payments on Fire episode, Marwan Forzley, CEO of Align Commerce, talks with Glenbrook's George Peabody about how his firm moves value for its SMB customers from the sender's currency to the receiver's over bitcoin rails.

EMV and its moving parts presents a far more complex payments method for merchants, ISVs, payment processors, and financial institutions than the good old magstripe. It continues to have ramifications throughout the payments ecosystem. 

As Executive Director of the Smart Card Alliance and director of the EMV Migration Forum, Randy Vanderhoof has shepherded a sometimes fractious payments industry as well as encouraged a a skeptical merchant community toward EMV adoption. Now that the US EMV deployment is a certainty, Randy and Glenbrook’s George Peabody discuss what got us here, where the challenges are, and how EMV will evolve in the US. 

It’s always intriguing to watch how a good idea evolves into new areas. Such evolution often happens when designers find new applications for their ideas. Brian Merritt and Ryan Hildebrand were part of the early team at Simple that was subsequently sold to BBVA. In mid-February, they announced the formation of Seed, a Y Combinator firm, designed to bring small business banking into the mobile and SaaS-based worlds. Listen to this conversation between Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Seed CEO Brian Merritt. While very early in the company’s development, Brian’s description of the company’s “API first” approach banking makes clear what’s possible when legacy technology and processes are in the rearview mirror.

Tablet-based ePOS cash registers are growing in popularity and capability. A boon to smaller retailers who have been laggards in store automation. But without technical support staff on hand, solving issues when they arrive, never mind securing systems, is an expensive proposition. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and payments industry veteran Chip Kahn, founder of Boomtown, a marketplace for merchant tech support pros, for a discussion on tablet POS trends, what SMB retailers needs, and the payments programmability.

Aaron Press of Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions joins Glenbrook's George Peabody for a discussion on mobile fraud trends based on the firm's True Cost of Fraud mCommerce report. While the mobile channel presents fraud and risk professionals with a wide variety of tools to mitigate losses, the report concludes that the mobile channel represents a disproportionately large loss vector. In this Payments on Fire podcast, we talk about why and what needs to happen to fix the problem.

Glenbrook's Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody talk with CBW Bank's Suresh Ramamurthi on payment innovation, risk management, and international remittances. Suresh is also founder of Yantra Financial Technologies. He and his wife were featured in this NY Times Dealbook article last month.

Glenbrook's George Peabody discusses Bitcoin and blockchain evolution with Sean Safahi, co-founder and CEO of Bold Financial Technologies, a provider of math-based currency services to the banking industry. Applications that make use of the bitcoin blockchain and consensus-based approaches are proliferating. We discuss these including the newly launched Stellar, a non-profit infrastructure provider for currency exchange and asset transfer. 

In this interview with Glenbrook's founding partner Carol Coye Benson, we discuss the prospects for a faster payments system in the US. Responding to the October 22 announcement by The Clearing House, Carol expresses her caution and hope for ways to accelerate replacement of today's system for credit push payments.   

Realtime, consumer-facing authorization of card payment transactions has been available for some time but few of us have it offered to us by our issuers. Today, there's a number of technology providers selling truly realtime notifications and two-way approval requests based on the live authorization stream. Glenbrook's Russ Jones takes us through what's on offer while George gets grumpy over what he's got today. As more consumers become thorougly alarmed over data and privacy breaches, this could be the time for issuers and independents to offer the "worried" consumer more control and a strong role in fraud management.

Companies mentioned in this episode include:

TSYS Spend Controls for consuemrs and corporate card administrators

MasterCard InControl

Vantiv MobiMoney

Red Giant Mobile

Join George Peabody in a conversation with Stockpile's Dan Schatt on virtual banking, innovation, and the future of PayPal.  Dan is former GM of Financial Innovations at PayPal and the author of Virtual Banking: A Guide to Innovation and Partnering, a new book that includes a chapter on Bitcoin and math-based currencies by Glenbrook's George Peabody.  We also discuss Stockpile's innovative approach to equities ownership, a business model that will be fascinating to watch develop.