Orchestration providers have certainly come a long way, and can enable powerful capabilities and benefits for the merchants that employ them. This post explores some of the possibilities Glenbrook has been thinking about for where Orchestration (and even orchestration) can go next.
In this month's Payments Post, we want to draw your attention to several recent fraud incidents that underscore the criticality of effective risk management to your business and the safety and soundness of the payments industry.
This month's Payments Post focuses on the announcement that Capital One intends to acquire Discover and considers the perspectives of the various ecosystem participants it affects.
We informally called 2023 “The Year of the Regulator” here at Glenbrook. 2024 is shaping up to be much the same. Certainly, some Glenbrookers think so – ‘regulator’ or ‘regulation’ was said 56 times in our first Payments on Fire episode this year, ‘What Glenbrook is Watching in 2024’. We can’t help but double down […]
Recap Earlier this week, we started to unpack one of the buzziest terms in payments: orchestration. As we define it, Orchestration Platforms facilitate a merchant’s multi-acquirer setup, in addition to providing services across the areas of transaction optimization, smart routing, and connections to multiple providers (acquirers, non-card payment methods, and related services such as risk […]
Introduction For those of us who follow the payments industry, it has been difficult in the past few years to avoid the hype around payments orchestration. The ubiquity of the term begs the question: what exactly does payments orchestration mean? We see the term used to describe providers serving FIs that will “orchestrate” – i.e., […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is an undeniable trend that an increasing number of businesses are embedding financial services into their products. Those that have embarked on this journey often experience multiple benefits if the new services solve an existing problem for their customer base, but it requires taking a thoughtful and informed approach to avoid negative downstream complications. […]