PAYMENTS ON FIRE RESOURCE CENTER

Smart thinking for smart payments professionals

Payments On Fire is the industry’s leading resource center for payments professionals. Here, you’ll find the resources and thought leadership that only Glenbrook’s experienced team can provide. Curated news stories, insightful opinion papers, provocative podcasts, and more – it’s all the thinking you need to stay competitive in a dynamic payments world.

May 7, 2024

Payments Post #13: At the Intersection of Tech, Regs, and Business Partnership

This month, Cici Northup joins regular contributor Justin Pituch to recap positive news in the form of fast payments growth, new fraud mitigation strategies, and evolution in cross-border transfers. All reflect, to varying degrees, the unique dynamic in the payments industry created by the intersection of technology, regulation, and new business partnerships.

August 10, 2023

April 27, 2022

May Bethany

CBDCs or Stablecoins? There’s space for both

By Bethany May Time to Read: 6 minutes Central Banks and Private Sector Issuers continue to develop their respective digital currencies, CBDCs and stablecoins. While this could be perceived as a type of competition, realistically both stablecoins and CBDCs could co-exist and provide differentiated benefits. Digital currencies are on the rise. Private sector stablecoins are […]

February 26, 2021

June 22, 2019

Bryan

In Zuck We Trust?          

We got the first real details this week on the Facebook-sponsored Libra cryptocurrency. Opinions are still taking shape around Glenbrook, but it’s fair to say that the team is deeply intrigued by the possibilities and sees it as both a novel and potentially very practical application of blockchain technology. We think the consortium-based governance, open […]

September 6, 2016

May 4, 2016

Five Answers - Sort of - to the Big Questions on Blockchain and Bitcoin

I’m back from two days at Consensus 2016 in NYC, and reporting as promised into my investigation of the Five Big Questions. 1. Bitcoin technology: will the problems (versions, processing time, scalability) be  resolved? Yes. My belief that we are all writing this off too soon in favor of “all things blockchain” was reinforced. Glenn […]

October 6, 2015

October 3, 2014

The Loosely Woven Threads of Sibos 2014

I’m just back from Boston and the marathon known as Sibos 2014. In a post earlier this week, I shared a couple of observations from the show floor and the conference sessions. Now that the conference has closed, I’m thinking about the themes that spoke to me. And, this year, I didn’t get the sense […]

September 11, 2014

Do You Want a Million Dollars?

I was delighted and fascinated to see that the Gates Foundation has issued a “Grand Challenge” on enabling universal acceptance of mobile money payments.  The Foundation’s previous best-known challenges have been in healthcare, notably for toilets and condoms, so this is quite a change! The Foundation is soliciting two-page proposals on innovative devices, software or business […]

May 20, 2014

Back from the Future: Bitcoin2014 Musings

Last week I was in Amsterdam for the second annual conference hosted by the The Bitcoin Foundation. As a strategist and advocate for ever-better payment solutions, I was very curious to learn how the Bitcoin protocol and its emerging enablers can address some of the most intractable challenges facing payments. For the most part, payments […]

January 8, 2014

December 22, 2013

October 14, 2013

Money2020: Impressions & Observations

I’ve nearly recovered from the payments overload that was Money2020 last week in Las Vegas – it was initially exhilarating, then incredibly exhausting, but I had a fantastic time. Here’s my admittedly subjective take based on having attended only two sessions (one of which I moderated) and stood in the back for only part of […]

August 16, 2013

Aggregation and Aggravation - Micropayments 2013

Micropayments is a problem that has never been solved in the payments industry. While there are various merchant-specific solutions for selling low-cost goods, the broader opportunity –– to pervasively enable micropayments –– continues to intrigue the payments industry. Why do micropayments endure as such a challenge in payments? The problem has been the same for […]

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