Time to Read: 9 minutes Highlights: An introduction to open banking, its key concepts, and implications for payments industry participants A framework for understanding open banking principles Adoption and usage statistics What is Open Banking and Why Does it Matter? Over the last few years, the concept of open banking has gained popularity with […]
Time to Read: 8 minutes Highlights: ACH, though a 50-year old payment system in the U.S., continues to grow The ACH ecosystem is evolving to meet modern-day needs: Nacha, the rule-making body, plans to implement a series of enhancements that address shortcomings in ACH usability Dynamic payment service providers (PSPs) and fintech infrastructure players are […]
Highlights It’s expensive to be a low income American, driven in part by the high cost of financial services available to such consumers. In this post, we break down where cost comes from, and how fintechs are changing the way working class Americans are able to access affordable financial products. Fintechs have an opportunity to […]
At Glenbrook, international financial inclusion work has long been a major focus area. Given the challenges racial equity concerns raises for the U.S., Glenbrook as a firm has returned our focus to financial inclusion here at home. To begin that examination, we look at the state of financial inclusion in the US and what are […]
Hosted as part of the Mobile Payment Conference (August 24-26) this inaugural conference brought together fintech influencers, payments experts, and providers to address issues facing financial services companies serving the Cannabis and CBD industry. Setting the Stage I was honored to kick off the workshop with an overview of the cannabis payments market. I stressed […]
The Income Domain consists of payments to individuals for salary, benefits, rebates, and expense reimbursements. In the U.S., these payments are made primarily via direct deposit through NACHA’s ACH system, and to a lesser extent, paper checks and payroll cards. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread business shutdown, and as a result, caused mass […]
Expansion Under COVID-19 The Remote Commerce domain is home to e-commerce, many mobile payments, and the venerable mail-order, telephone-order method (MOTO). The growth in transaction volume in this domain has been nothing short of phenomenal accounting for a: 56 percent of overall U.S. retail sales growth in 2019 47 percent increase in U.S. sales forecasted […]
The POS Domain is Synonymous with the Retail Industry The POS Commerce domain is the land of brick and mortar retail, representing the majority of retail activity. Despite the steady double digit annual growth of the Remote Commerce domain, the POS Commerce domain was responsible for some 84% of retail sales in 2019. That said, […]
Given the coronavirus pandemic and its pressure on governments and individuals alike, Glenbrook’s Global Practice has been looking into how emergency social disbursements can be made quickly to the most vulnerable populations. This is not an easy task for a number of reasons: Governments want to be certain that the intended person is indeed the […]
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 […]
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 […]
In my last post I covered the proliferation of challenger banks, the mobile-first, digital-only neo-banks and what differentiates them from the incumbents. While the media lens is usually focused on the front-end, the user experience, I’m always curious about what’s powering these operations under the hood. From the traditional banks’ perspective, fintech companies are just […]
Georgia is a nexus of global payment processing and merchant acquiring activity. Some two-thirds of all U.S. purchase volume is processed there. That’s a lot of debit and credit card transactions. But what are those same companies doing to improve payments for the underbanked? That combination of payments technology and financial inclusion concerns was the […]
Fintech startups have begun a phenomenon some call the “unbundling of financial services” through standalone products such as unsecured consumer loans, credit cards, checking and savings accounts, or personal financial management tools. A cohort of entities known as “challenger banks” or “neo-banks” have also entered the market in an attempt to take on digital banking […]
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 […]