Erin McCune Glenbrook Payments Views Women Professionals

Dispatch from the 2020 U.S. Women in Payments Symposium, February 10-11, 2020

This Women in Payments event has been going on for at least 5 years and this was the first time I attended — I regret that it took so long! Hats off to Kristy Duncan and her team for putting together a substantive event with a refreshing mix of industry insight and professional development and […]

Bryan Derman Glenbrook Uncategorized

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 […]

Russ Jones

The Five Biggest Trends in Payments

All of the 2019 prediction stories got me thinking about the mega trends in the payments industry. These are the year-over-year tectonic shifts in the industry that you can bet your company’s strategy on — maybe even bet your career on. In a landscape of trees, this is what the forest looks like. Trend #1 […]

Amazon Amazon Payments B2B Big Data Card Payments ECommerce Ecommerce Payments Merchants Prepaid Russ Jones

Is Amazon Best-in-Class for Online Payments?

Amazon.com is in the news all the time with its continued expansion of markets and fulfillment centers, its focus on innovation and long term R&D, and, recently, some very non-intuitive acquisitions. It’s easy to get swept up in their story. But when a company gets as big and powerful as Amazon has become, it’s helpful […]

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Money20/20 Wrap-up

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in payment initiation over the last few years. Apple Pay, Android Pay, Walmart Pay and their like have filled Payments News headline stories. But this year, at Money20/20, consumer-facing innovation downshifted to a lower gear. And that’s a good thing. Getting Down to Work “Mobile” news cooled because the […]

B2B B2B Payments Banking Industry Bill Payment & Presentment Card Networks Carol Coye Benson Elizabeth McQuerry Fast Payments Federal Reserve TCH

Two Paths for Faster

The always-interesting Federal Reserve Bank Chicago Payments Symposium just closed, and predictably, a lot of the discussion (and argument!) was around “faster” – the evolving progress of the United States towards improvements in our payments systems. I was particularly interested in hearing other people’s views on the outlook for this in our country. I came […]

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Millennials and Money – Are they Maligned or Misunderstood?

Contrary to popular belief, the millennial generation is not lazy, entitled or narcissistic.  They are a robust group of entrepreneurial, socially astute and media savvy consumers.  They make discerning decisions about their money and are thoughtful about the companies they trust. Last week I chaired a conference titled:  Millennials and Money.  We discussed similarities and […]

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Merchant Acceptance in the Developing World – Mobile Payments’ Essential Missing Link

Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Glenbrook have been working on a variety of projects focused on bringing low-cost financial services to the poor in developing countries. While there has been a lot written on how mobile or eMoney payments systems such as M-PESA in Kenya have grown in many developing […]

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Really Big Questions in Payments

Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg wrote a few weeks ago about his view of the Grand Challenges in payments…. a daunting list, and one I agree with.  But I want to extend his discussion on one of his challenges:  “Realigned value chain economics in a push payment world”, and add two more: “What is the proper role […]

Bill Payment & Presentment Cash Payments Erin McCune Government Payments

The Global Struggle of Government Payments

Over the last year, I’ve been focused on government payments – a compelling mashup of traditional bill pay and multi-channel retail requirements against an intriguing backdrop of policy, economic, and political interactions. Although many countries have made solid progress implementing eGovernment initiatives (UN E-Government Survey 2014), the level and sophistication of ePayments implementation lags the […]

ACH B2B Banking Industry Carol Coye Benson Fast Payments Federal Reserve Innovation Interchange P2P TCH Wires

Faster Now Faster?

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a chance to talk about the prospects for faster payments in the U.S. with representatives from both The Clearing House and the Fed.  Both groups, as I’m sure you know, are actively working the space: the Fed with its ongoing Payments Systems Improvement initiative, now with a number of task […]

ACH Banking Industry Carol Coye Benson Elizabeth McQuerry Fast Payments Federal Reserve Glenbrook Payments Education NACHA

Now What? Immediate Funds Transfer in the U.S.

The Federal Reserve’s recent announcement that it would not build a new payment rail for processing faster payments created some disappointment for many who are unsatisfied with our country’s current payments system capabilities. In a welcome move, The Clearinghouse (TCH) has announced its intention to fill this void and build new real-time “rails”. There are, […]

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A Central Bank Takes on Mobile Payments

Ecuador’s Central Bank has embarked on an ambitious course to launch an affordable and widely available mobile payment scheme.  In fact, it will be the national wallet. With some uncertainty, it appears that Ecuador’s initiative may be the second central bank effort to enter this space. Jordan’s central bank has launched “JoMoPay”, but for those […]

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Learnings from the Bitcoin Workshop

Bryan Derman and I led Glenbrook’s second Bitcoin: Basics and Beyond workshop a couple of weeks go, this time in NYC from the 22nd floor board room of the Downtown Conference Center, a great space (the staff took great care of us, too, thank you). As with every Glenbrook workshop—especially with our smaller Insight workshops on […]

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It's Not About Payments

I just attended NACHA’s Council for Electronic Billing and Payments and I’ve come away with an even firmer opinion that this payments business I’m in isn’t about payments. It’s about data. A retail payment transaction has the potential to throw off a lot of valuable information: what you bought, what you bought along with it, […]