Carol Coye Benson Ecommerce Payments Fast Payments Financial Inclusion Government Payments Innovation Interoperability Micropayments Mobile Banking & Payments Mobile Money Mobile Wallets Women Professionals

Two Remarkable Women - And the Mobile Payments Systems They Have Built

I had the good fortune last week to be part of the Glenbrook team attending the FinTechStage Inclusion Forum in Jakarta. Happily, among the attendees were two women I have known for several years: Maha Bahou of the Central Bank of Jordan and Carolina Trivelli of Pagos Digitales Peruanos. Peru and Jordan are two of […]

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MRC Las Vegas 2017:  It’s Not Just About Transaction Risk

This past week, over 1400 payments professionals convened in Las Vegas for the annual Merchant Risk Council (MRC) conference, an event that I’ve had the pleasure of attending for over a decade.  While merchant fraud detection and risk management continue to be the core theme of the conference, traditional payment service providers had a strong […]

Tags: Chris Uriarte machine learning

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Payments 2017 – One Month In

Business evolution—whether it’s automotive, bioscience, or in the payments industry—proceeds along a predictable path of incremental improvements and optimization. Until it doesn’t and a step function takes effect. Last year was sleepy compared to what we can expect during the next eleven months. 2016 was characterized by the more familiar path, through themes set in […]

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Artificial Intelligence in Payments

We have started development on this year’s Innovation in Payments workshop, and I wanted to share our current thinking on a new topic we’re including for the first time –– the use of artificial intelligence technologies in the payments industry. AI technologies have been around for a while in the payments industry –– think about […]

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Merchant App Stores Today

In what seems quite a number of years ago, back in 2012, Merchant Warehouse (now Cayan), announced what I think was the first “Merchant App Store”, marketed as the Genius Customer Engagement Platform. Running on a somewhat traditional Verifone MX915 terminal, it was an early forerunner to the current iOS and Android-powered tablet-based offerings. I […]

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The Age of Context and Security

The news from Target, increasing the number of cards compromised to 70 million and the expansion of data loss to mailing and email addresses, phone numbers, and names, affirms that we’re in a security crisis.  As my colleague Scott Loftesness puts it, card data is, from a brand and business perspective, the new radioactive material.  […]

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Payments Regulation in the United States is Hampering Innovation (Really?)

A great friend of Glenbrook’s is Broox Peterson, formerly Senior Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Visa International and currently in private practice. Earlier we posted his article So You Want to Start a Payments Company? which has helped many entrepreneurs and investors understand the considerations involved in payments-related businesses. In this new article, […]

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The State of Payments: 2014

What a year it has been! Twelve months ago, there were still people in our industry who didn’t know what Bitcoin was. There were still people who believed that EMV would roll out in the U.S. just like it did in the U.K. There were still people who thought that the developing world would build […]

Tags: state of payments

Bitcoin PayPal Russ Jones

Does PayPal Need A Bitcoin Strategy?

Because we live in a tweet-constrained world, the short answer is yes. But I think every player in the financial services industry needs a Bitcoin strategy — payments enablers especially. By strategy I mean that every company involved in payments should evaluate whether Bitcoin, and digital currencies (math-based, virtual, etc.) more broadly, are friend or […]

Tags: bitcoin strategy

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ATM Cash-outs, Security, and the Coming Authentication Battles

The arrest of eight in New York who participated in a global $45 million ATM cash-out attack revealed, once again, some hard truths about the cyber security posture of financial systems and the enterprises that operate essential payment infrastructure. First, the organization and sophistication of the attackers continues to improve.  These are global organizations peopled […]

Tags: fraud

Glenbrook Jacqueline Chilton Management Payments Professionals Research Round Up

Annual Glenbrook Payments Survey: Tell Us About YOUR Payments Organization

We are conducting our third annual payments organization survey to learn how companies’ internal structures are evolving to manage the ever-increasing complexity of payments. We are eager to learn how your company manages payments, and how your payments organization is changing – whether you are a biller, eCommerce merchant, or retailer; whether you sell to consumers or businesses (or […]

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Machine Learning: A Road to Smarter Payments

I recently had the time and opportunity to bone up on machine learning.  The opportunity that presented itself was a 10-week on-line course taught by a well known Stanford Computer Science professor, Andrew Ng.  The course, offered by coursera.org included lectures, quizzes, and programming exercises. It was great. And it really got me thinking about […]

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Carol Coye Benson Disruptive Innovation Fast Payments Financial Regulators Global Payments

Faster, Better, Cheaper - Like it or Not

A new wave of payment capabilities is hitting shores around the world. This wave is made up of better, faster, and cheaper “credit-push” systems.  That means that transactions enter the payments systems from the sender’s bank (like a wire transfer) rather than from the recipient’s bank (like a card or check).  Credit-push payments have a […]

Tags: credit-push push payments

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The State of Payments – U.S. Market 2012

It’s hard to believe that the end of 2012 is in sight – and it’s almost equally hard to believe that three years ago, a few of us at Glenbrook were thinking, “gee – all the exciting stuff in payments has already happened”. Yet we don’t think we’ve ever seen so much action in the […]

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Live Blogging Finovate Spring 2012 San Francisco

Good morning! Gearing up for the two-day typing marathon that is Finovate. We’re at a huge venue this year (same as last year, apparently – someone else from Glenbrook was here then), a cavernous exhibition hall that has plenty of room for the 1200+ attendees; I can remember when there were 250 attendees. Congrats to […]