BNPL Lending

Buy Now, Pay Later: Where Have the Months Gone?

At the beginning of the year, I hypothesized that four issues needed to be addressed for sustained Buy Now, Pay Later success. What happened this year? To what extent did we mature our BNPL market?  Let’s take a look at 2023 progress: Issue 1: BNPL Education January recommendation: We need more and better consumer education […]

Merchants PaymentsPost

Payments Post #6: Glenbrook's August Roundup

Chris Uriarte and Justin Pituch put their heads together to sift through the August news in search of a broader storyline. Looking back at headlines surrounding merchant surcharging, fee backlash, and Adyen’s lackluster H1 performance, we noted an underlying theme of broad downward pressure on the cost of merchant processing. Companies like Toast and Adyen […]

Tags: Fintech

Fast Payments PaymentsPost

Payments Post #5: Glenbrook's June/July Roundup

Payments Post was on vacation last month; your editor was making his way from Berkeley, CA to a new home in Chicago, IL. But now that I’m settled in the Windy City, I’m happy to present this “double feature” post, covering developments in both June and July. Two major themes span these two months: 1) […]

Tags: Fintech

Cross-border Payments Fast Payments Global Payments

On the journey to fast and low-cost cross-border payments (not yet at the destination)

Impetus to improve cross-border payments Whether you are deep in the cross-border payments space or have sent (or tried to send) a cross-border payment, you know these are not as easy as paying for your morning coffee or sending money to a local friend for last night’s dinner. Domestic payments have become faster, if not […]

B2B Payments Data Fast Payments ISO 20022

Fast Payments, Rich Data

FedNow – the Federal Reserve’s new instant payment service – went live earlier this summer, and it could signal big changes ahead for B2B payments. Why? It comes down to data. B2B payments are rife with data challenges. In my last post, I described that the funds transfer component of a B2B transaction is often […]

B2B Payments

B2B: Why the Pain?

B2B payments keep commerce moving, but B2B transactions can be incredibly painful for both senders and receivers. Check usage remains stubbornly high in the B2B space, even post-lockdown. Manual processes abound. So what makes B2B transactions so difficult, even as digitization transforms other business processes and areas of the payments world? And what technologies are […]

Tags: Real-time Payments

Customer Relationship Management Merchants PSPs

Poor Account Management: The Silent Killer of Payment Service Providers

The major global payment service providers (PSPs) are in perpetual competition to provide their target merchants with the highest quality of payments acceptance technology. However, one of the most common reasons that Glenbrook sees merchants leave their PSP has nothing to do with technology. They leave due to poor account management. Account management is the […]

Visa

Is this the Future of Reducing 3D-Secure Friction in the Long Term?:  A Look at Visa’s Digital Authentication Framework (DAF)

In this post, Glenbrook provides a solutions review. This is a new type of Glenbrook payments views post that deep dives into a particular market solution.  Once in a while, we run into a few topics and innovations that we think could have a major benefit to the payments industry but aren’t being discussed in […]

Tags: Risk Management

Biometrics Consumers Economic Outlook

Payments Post #4: Glenbrook's May Roundup

Welcome to the May installment of Payments Post, where we’re highlighting the news that got Glenbrook talking. The common thread that emerged in May was the American consumer. We observed a burst of news highlighting technology reshaping how American consumers make purchases and verify their identity. At the same time, other articles underscored how American […]

Fast Payments

Payments Post #3: Glenbrook's April Roundup

Welcome back to Payments Post. Last month’s edition was all about banks; this month’s is about “paying by bank”. Or to be a bit more semantically precise, account-to-account (A2A) payments. We were particularly interested in Visa’s Visa+ initiative, iDEAL’s apparent pan-European future, and Plaid’s upcoming payouts product. Regular contributor Justin Pituch digs in this week […]

Fast Payments

Ready for U.S. Faster Payments 2.0?

Today’s U.S. faster payments market is not the one we envisioned. In market for five-plus years now, RTP® and Zelle® laid the foundation of faster payments in the country but, as with most new payment systems, challenges inhibit adoption. Volumes in both networks have grown but are not at the levels expected for a country […]

Tags: Real-time Payments

Fast Payments

Where are fast payments systems headed in the U.S.?

We are in the early stages of fast payments here in the U.S. Zelle and RTP are live and the FedNow Service is about to launch. In the near-term, I expect fast payments ecosystem stakeholders will stay hyper focused on simple yet critical enablers of connectivity and volume. For example, connectivity will depend on financial […]

Tags: Real-time Payments

Banking

Payments Post #2: Glenbrook's March Roundup

Surprise! We spent a lot of the past month thinking about banks. March confronted us with stumbling blocks for fintechs and their sponsor banks, a bank-led battle for the checkout page, and a clearer view of the path forward for U.S. fast payments. Let’s dive into it in this second edition of Payments Post, our […]

Fast Payments

Opportunities in U.S. Fast Payments

At Glenbrook, we believe that efficient and inclusive financial services are vital to economic growth. In support of this mission, we have worked on fast payments initiatives in 55 countries or regions to date. For example, we have developed principles for inclusive instant payments systems, contributed to the implementations of these systems, supported stakeholder convening […]

Tags: Real-time Payments

Banking Merchant Acquirers Risk & Fraud

Examining Risk and Resiliency in Banking Relationships (..and no, we’re not just talking about bank failures)

On Monday a few weeks back, a member of a client’s executive team gave me a call: “We really need to speed up the project to find another bank sponsor.” That was followed by a call from another client later that day: “We’ve been thinking about what it would take to form a relationship with […]

Tags: Chris Uriarte Fintech Risk Management