Payments in Enterprises
Enterprises often to come to Glenbrook with three core goals:
1. Increase Sales
2. Lower Costs
3. Improve Customer Experience
To support these goals, we bring expertise to help your team answer questions like:
How can we optimize revenue by improving authorization rates and managing chargebacks?
How are our payment providers performing? Are we using the right partners?
How are our key payment metrics performing? How could they improve?
Is our tokenization strategy effective? Does our payments architecture support our objectives?
How can we lower processing costs?
Is our organization structured effectively for managing payments?
How we can help
Glenbrook provides payment acceptors with strategic and operational expertise by conducting assessments of current operations and partner performance, optimizing acceptance rates and payments costs, supporting vendor selection, and developing targeted payments strategies. The practice builds upon Glenbrook’s 22+ years of experience, where the firm has developed a reputation as the most trusted name in the payments industry. Glenbrook’s team of experts combines decades of operating experience at enterprises, card networks, and payment service providers with exposure throughout the payments industry.
Common focus areas and services include:
Payments Operations Assessment and Strategy
- Conduct a comprehensive assessment of payment operations to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas for improvements
- Develop a tailored payment strategy that aligns with business goals and enhances customer satisfaction
- Identify cost-saving opportunities, streamline processes, and recommend technology enhancements to optimize payment operations and maximize profitability
RFP Management and Vendor Selection
- Create customized RFPs that reflect unique requirements and objectives
- Evaluate vendor responses objectively, using custom scorecards based on priorities
- Support negotiations to secure favorable terms, pricing, and service level agreements (SLAs) with selected vendors
Authorization Rate and Involuntary Churn Optimization
- Analyze authorization and related data to identify patterns and trends affecting approval rates and involuntary churn
- Develop strategies to increase approval rates, reduce declines, enhance checkout experiences, and retain customers
- Develop customized KPIs and data dashboards for ongoing analysis and monitoring of authorization rates and other indicators
Price Benchmarking and Negotiation Support
- Benchmark current pricing against industry standards and competitors
- Develop strategies to reduce payment processing costs while maintaining service quality
- Review contracts to ensure they align with negotiated terms
- Provide expert guidance and negotiation support to help secure competitive pricing and favorable terms with payment service providers
Team education on the payments industry and customized topics
Glenbrook’s public and private payments workshops, and on-demand modules
Access to Glenbrook’s team through expert retainer agreements
Customized, deep-dive strategy workshops
Enterprises Case Studies
Resources
Articles
Glenbrook shares our perspectives on activities in the industry.
Mid-Year Payments Check-In: Revisiting Our 2026 Predictions
The Glenbrook team is taking stock in June 2026 to see how the payments trends predictions from our January Payments on Fire episode are holding up.
The Missing Context Layer in Agentic Commerce: Part 3
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond explores the specific implications for the payments and agentic commerce industry: how discovery changes when agents mediate it, how payment selection shifts upstream, how merchants need to prepare differently across categories, and who ultimately controls the agent layer.
The Missing Context Layer in Agentic Commerce: Part 2
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond examines why the agent’s role in agentic commerce varies significantly by purchase category, where the context layer is being built today, and how far along it actually is.
Podcasts
Glenbrook speaks with industry leaders to share a variety of perspectives on the latest payments trends and activities.
Episode 303 – Fanning the Flames: Every Payment, Every Environment, All at Once
This episode is a follow up to Drew Edmond’s 2025 payments performance optimization series, and 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.
Episode 302 – Catching Up on the Capital Markets, with Timothy Chiodo, UBS
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 on 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.
Episode 301 – Casting Light on the Digital Euro, with Nicola Branzoli, Banca d’Italia
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.
News
Glenbrook objectively curates the news to keep you abreast of important daily headlines in payments.
ICBA Sues OCC Over National Trust Bank Charters for Crypto Firms
"Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey issued a statement on the lawsuit filed n the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for authorizing novel...
The Future Is for Everyone: Muse for Small Business [Video]
"Earlier this month Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent available in the US and Canada that completes tasks on your behalf. We’re expanding it with a collection of new skills and connectors inside Muse to help people run their businesses. Small businesses told...
FinCEN Withdraws Proposals on Crypto Recordkeeping
"The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is withdrawing two proposed rules that would have created new recordkeeping requirements for financial institutions for certain transactions involving convertible virtual currencies. The first rule was proposed in 2020 and...
Ready to see how Glenbrook can support your enterprise to be as efficient and effective as possible?