In this episode, we’re talking about something core to Glenbrook – payments education. Several years ago, one of our founding partners, Carol Coye Benson, observed that the start of most client engagements required a “primer” on payments – to make sure that everyone on the client team had a shared understanding of payments and was able to use industry terminology to communicate with each other – and with us – accurately.

Well, that got Carol thinking that maybe a more formal education program would help not just our clients but also people in the industry. So she started what was to become our “Payments Boot Camp” workshop.

Since then, over 34,000 professionals have gone through a Glenbrook workshop, and over 43,000 payments books (another brainchild of Carol’s) are in circulation from Glenbrook Press.

Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones join Yvette Bohanan to discuss Glenbrook’s focus on payments education and share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34,000 (and counting) payments geeks. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes insights from their workshop experiences and highlights from the latest offering, On-Demand Learning, as Glenbrook continues to evolve payments education with the changing industry landscape.

 

 

 

Yvette Bohanan: Hello, I’m Yvette Bohanan, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire. In this episode, we’re talking about something core to Glenbrook, payments education. Several years ago, one of our founding partners, Carol Coye Benson, observed that at the start of most client engagements, our clients required a little bit of a primer on payments to make sure that everyone on the team had a shared understanding of payments and was able to use industry terminology to communicate with each other and with us accurately.

Well, that got Carol thinking that maybe a more formal education program would help not just our clients, but also people in the industry. So she started what was to become our Payments Boot Camp workshop. Since then, over 34, 000 professionals have gone through a Glenbrook workshop, and over 43, 000 payments books, another brainchild of Carol’s, are in circulation from Glenbrook Press.

Joining me for this episode are Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones to share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34, 000 and counting payments geeks and to talk about our latest addition to our lineup in education, on-demand learning. I’m very excited about this.

Debbie, Russ, welcome to Payments on Fire.

Russ Jones: Thank you for having us, Yvette.

Debbie Bartoo: Yvette, it’s great to be here. This is a topic that is definitely near and dear to me.

Yvette Bohanan: Me too, and it has been a long time coming. So, we’re going to dig in. We’re going to talk a little bit about some fun facts and maybe talk about some of the things that come up in our workshops over and over again. Some of those favorite perennial questions that we get, try to give some folks a little bit of insight.

But before we get to that, Russ, you have been facilitating workshops, I’ll just say for a while.

Russ Jones: A long time.

Yvette Bohanan: A long time. And I’ve worked with you, Debbie’s worked with you now for several years, delivering these. And we all know things don’t always go as planned, right? So I’m just curious, before we get into it, what’s something that has really surprised you in the workshop, that kind of caught you off guard, maybe just one of those moments, you know?

Russ Jones: Yeah, it’s not so much catch you off guard as sort of memorable type of workshops, if you will. And it could be memorable for any number of reasons. It could be because the setting was awkward or it was in a public space and we were talking very intimate details about payment systems or it could be the assumptions that people bring into the room when they arrive. I’m always sort of fascinated by how people think payment systems work. It’s driven by their perspective of where they sit in their career a lot of times or how they use payment systems as an individual, their personal preferences. Right off the bat, people are amazed that most Americans prefer debit cards over credit cards.

That’s just flabbergasting to people because by and large, the people in our workshops use credit cards for everything. So they don’t understand why cash is continuing to grow, they don’t understand why more Americans use debit cards than credit cards, their walk in the door assumption is that the payments industry is a synonym for the card industry.

And yes, they acknowledge there’s other payment systems besides the card system, but they’re secondary to cards. So they’re astounded when they see that ACH volume is a magnitude of 10 larger than card system volume, things like that. The thing that really sort of sticks in my mind, a famous quote from one of our workshop participants, we were talking about cross-border payments, which is always a big topic in the workshops, endless fascination around how money moves across borders.

And one of the surprising things is that it doesn’t really move across border, at a cross-border basis. It never really leaves the country. The money supply doesn’t change when somebody sends some money to another country. And I remember, distinctly remember one participant saying “wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense. This is impossible. You mean to tell me that the only way money really leaves the country is if it’s in a suitcase on an airplane?” We said, now you understand it.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. By the way, you’re not supposed to do that.

Russ Jones: That’s right. That’s why it’s so heavily regulated.

Yvette Bohanan: Like I tell people all the time, if it were true that money was leaving and coming in and out of every country in the world, you’d have planes, trains, automobiles, ships, cargo ships, moving cash around, you know, physical currency. It’s just not happening. But people don’t think about that and I think that’s one of the things about the workshops is it gets people thinking.

Russ Jones: It’s sort of an eye opening look at how the payments industry really works, not how it’s said to work on LinkedIn.

Yvette Bohanan: Okay, we’re not going to go there.

Russ Jones: Not to pick on LinkedIn, love LinkedIn.

Yvette Bohanan: Yes. But there’s uninformed news commentary or whatever, right? I mean, there’s all sorts of things out there that, people use words, they use terminology, they’re not quite sure what it means. And honestly, the industry has a lot of ambiguity.

And we have our list of favorite terms that are just a mess. As they said when I lived in Charlotte, it’s kind of a hot mess. Sometimes things are a little bit of a hot mess in the industry, when people are trying to talk to each other.

Russ Jones: Yeah, that’s, that’s really true. And some of it is sort of an accidental stroke of history that we end up with one word that means three different things, that type of stuff. Other times you have industry participants, in my opinion, trying to blatantly co-opt terminology, and on one hand, I’ve got to give a little bit of acknowledgement, I guess, to the credit card issuers who have managed to convince people that credit cards and cash are very similar.

Yvette Bohanan: Well, yeah.

Russ Jones: You buy something in the store, you get cash back. That’s incredible. I remember another workshop we did where someone asked about cash back and we started explaining how cash back worked.

It was like Mars and Venus talking because they were asking about getting a 20 dollar bill back in a grocery store from using their debit card. They paid for their purchase and they got 20 dollar cash back. And we were answering the question in the context of, how does the economics work for a credit card issuer who provides cash back to consumer has reward when they use, when they draw down their credit line. There’s a lot of confusing terminology out there.

Yvette Bohanan: There is, there’s also a lot of questions that come up. And Debbie, I know for this on-demand learning, which we’ll talk about in just a bit, we came up with how many knowledge check questions?

Debbie Bartoo: Oh, my gosh, there are well over 150 when you talk about one particular course because there are just so many things to try and understand and relate to.

Yvette Bohanan: You’re learning, you’re in your on-demand module, watching the video that we have, looking at the slides, you’re doing that. And then basically, when that module is completed, we ask you a bunch of questions to make sure that we were effective in explaining the material to you and you got it. You understood it. So that’s a knowledge check question.

Russ Jones: These are not interactive sessions that are scheduled, right? They’re learn at your own pace. There’s no one from Glenbrook looking over your shoulder answering questions so you’ve got to test that you’re grasping content, the ideas as you go along.

So a typical knowledge check might be, how does money leave the country? Pick the right answer. In a suitcase, on an airplane.

Yvette Bohanan: Debbie, what do you think? What was one of your favorite questions that we got to answer as part of our knowledge check?

Debbie Bartoo: Sure. And you know, the questions are intended to be tricky. I mean, they’re intended to help people really try to think through what the answers are. And when I think about a particular question, it’s not so much a question, I would say it’s more about a topic. And one of the topics that really happens to stand out is all about what’s going on with the ACH system, the Automated Clearing House system.

People tend to be really surprised when they understand the background and how it actually operates, that it operates as a batch system, that operates with these files that go back and forth between organizations. And what we understand with technology today, and we just don’t expect file based systems to be as prominent as they are.

But yet the ACH system, low cost, high volume. It works. It just works. So it’s that rewarding moment, I think, when we see people start to connect the dots and they start to understand why these systems are like they are and maybe why some haven’t changed for so many years, but also seeing that we’re bringing a lot of modernization into what’s going on with payments today and seeing people start to connect those dots is what’s exciting to me.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, file exchange, how quaint.

Russ Jones: Yeah, well, well, how quaint, but the human part of it is, yeah, yes, it might be quaint, it might be mainframes and sort of legacy computing. But boy, ACH is hot today. It is a hot, hot topic.

Yvette Bohanan: It’s growing, but it’s growing because a lot of other systems are relying on it. Because it’s ubiquitous, because it’s everywhere. Okay, so you brought up modernization and other systems coming online. And another question we hear a lot about new stuff, new-ish stuff is, Is PayPal and Venmo, are they the same thing as like Pix in Brazil or UPI in India? What’s going on under the covers there, right? That’s always a great question.

Debbie Bartoo: I’m not going to give you the answer here because you actually have to take the course in order to find that out.

It’s understanding that there are all these different scenarios on how they work and what makes them different and, globally, how certain countries are progressing ahead quicker than other countries and understanding what we can learn from them, whoever is developing the latest and greatest because these systems don’t stand still.

Yvette Bohanan: Well, okay, so we’ll give everybody a hint if you don’t know the answer. PayPal, Venmo, they might be driving up volume in ACH or some of the newer systems, whereas some of these other systems like Pix, UPI, RTP, they’re different. We get into all of this, right, in all of our workshops.

It’s something that once you understand these concepts and what’s going on under the hood, you can’t unsee it anymore. I think that’s one of the big things people walk away with in the workshop. They’re like, I can’t make a payment anymore without questioning everything and trying to relate it back to what you told me. People really say this, right? Because you can’t unsee it. Once it’s all laid out in front of you, you can’t put it back in the box and pretend like you don’t know what’s going on.

Debbie Bartoo: Exactly. I mean, it’s as simple as going to the store and making a grocery store payment and then understanding, well, what happens within those seconds between the authorization and when it’s cleared and everything else that goes on behind the scenes. And that becomes what makes us payment professionals, to understand those important components.

Russ Jones: Let me share a humorous Venmo anecdote from one of our workshops. At the start, almost of every workshop we do and at the start of all of our on-demand learning courses, we define what are the core payment systems? How are they used? How are they different? How are they similar?

And usage patterns, the so called volume, if you will. And so it’s ACH versus debit cards, credit cards, checks, on and on. And I remember in one workshop, somebody said, well, why don’t you have Venmo on that chart? And I said, Well, the answer is that Venmo is not a core payment system that is systemically important to the health of the US economy. It’s a popular system, a lot of people use it, but it’s, from a volume point of view, it kind of rounds to zero when you compare it against the world of wires and ACH and cards and stuff like that. And this person was really, kind of like was at juxtapositions, and they said, Well, I don’t understand, it seems like I’m constantly reading about Venmo on Payments News. Why do you guys talk about it so much on Payments News, if it’s dwarfed by all these other systems? And that’s kind of a good question, to some extent.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, it is. You have to understand what’s going on in the industry. I mean, that’s kind of why we do Payments News. What’s topical today. But you also have to put those stories that we, we captured the headlines that we think are relevant that people should know about in that feed, you have to have the context and the perspective to know this is up and coming. However, this up and coming system is non-core, but it’s using core systems, and it’s gaining traction, and it’s changing economics, right, for merchants. And it’s doing certain things for consumers. And it’s displacing volume somewhere else. And, and, and, right? Once you have the fundamentals down, you can start to pick things apart and not just take those headlines at face value. That’s one of the things that we consistently hear from people, right? I now get this.

And, we even have exercises when we do stuff in person and in virtual environments when we’re teaching live where we have that exercise about stakeholders. And we give everybody headlines, and we ask them to dissect, who are these stakeholders that they’re talking about in the headline. And they’re real headlines, from real news stories. And once people start to dissect it, they actually understand what that headline is telling them, rather than just sort of parroting back what an editor and a copywriter and an author actually said, right, but actually pulling it apart.

That’s why we do this, I think, is to make people aware and knowledgeable so they can make good decisions when they’re doing their work, because the more people in this industry making good decisions, the better and stronger the industry gets. That’s kind of gets to the heart of what we’re doing.

Debbie, you led the charge for getting this stuff on-demand, right? Why was this important to you? You’ve dedicated the better part of this year, Debbie, to pulling us all together to do this.

Debbie Bartoo: It’s for me, a part of it is I love challenges.

It was so much more than that. Many years ago, even when I was going through education and seeing how education was changing the dynamics and what became important to people. You wanted to learn, but you didn’t necessarily have the time to sit in a classroom for three hours after work, then spend an hour driving home and all of that.

And so I became very interested in what was going on with online education. And it wasn’t just the fact that you could do it online, but it was all these fantastic tools that are coming to be right now. And to give people the opportunity to learn about what’s going on in payments. When people come to our sessions, you can tell that they’re interested, they want to know more. This gives people another way. It gives, I would think, even more people an opportunity to take courses and take them on their own time when they can really spend time learning the important components of it. So to me, it’s been so much more than just, let’s put some courses out there.

It’s building them with the right tools. It’s figuring out which are the best courses to get there initially, knowing that this is only the beginning. There is so much more for us to do. We’re at the very beginning of the stages of what we’re developing and we’ll continue on in the next couple years because there’s just so many different topics right now in payments.

There’s a lot going on. So we’ll continue to deliver those, the things that are most needed or that we find that people most ask about to as far as what’s going on in payments.

Yvette Bohanan: If we wind back the clock a little bit, we have 30, 000 people, right, that had gone through a workshop, up until four years ago when COVID showed up. All of those folks, that vast majority of people that had gone through workshops, did in-person workshops.

We traveled all over the country, predominantly in the US, delivering these workshops two, three days. We’d have public forums where people came to San Francisco or New York or Atlanta. It was all in person. And then COVID hit and we had to pivot and go virtual. And, we had this realization at that point, I think. I remember doing one of the very first virtual workshops on Zoom and there was some person on the other side of the planet, dialed in on Zoom, whispering to us that he had to be off camera, because he was in his bathroom, learning, and everyone else in the house was asleep or something, it was just wild. But it was such a moment, I think, where we realized, A, people really want to learn this stuff and get smarter about payments, great. But B, to the extent that they’re willing to go to and, that individual and many more since then dialing in from all over the planet, right? Day and night, dial into the Zoom workshop. I think that was part of what made us realize, you we need to get this in a consumable format that people can do this at a reasonable hour and get as much out of it as they would listening in on zoom. So that was really the goal here. Right? Make it more accessible.

Russ Jones: Also make it more bite sized. We live in a YouTube centric world today where everything you want to know in life can be netted down to a seven minute video.

Historically, we looked at an agenda for a client as a series of one hour topics. ACH system, let’s talk about it for one hour.

Our clients were telling us, Our employees are younger, they’re in tune with the video on-demand economy we live in and everything needs to be bite sized. If you’re curious about it, you need to find it, watch it quickly, understand it and move on. And so that’s what we’ve tried to do with the on-demand learning is make our content library bite size, if you will, so that people can really go at it. I remember one of our clients told us his vision. We were asking him, What can we do to better serve you, how can we help you be more effective when it comes to keeping your employees up to date with what’s going on in the payments industry? And he says, It’s real simple. I want a software engineer to get on a Bart train in Daly City, pull up on their iPhone a seven minute video on interchange, and when they get off, walk into the office, they know everything there is to know about interchange. And so that was like, wow. Yeah. Something to chew on. Wouldn’t that be great?

Debbie Bartoo: I think it’s not just one particular type of student that’s interested. These courses, they support a broad range of people in the industry, whether it’s new people, all of a sudden they’ve undergone an organizational change and they’re tasked with, now you’re responsible for payments, and they hadn’t been near or dear to payments as we have been.

Or maybe it’s people that have been in payments for a number of years and they still want to learn more because there is definitely always something to learn about what’s going on in payments. Or people transitioning. People have been very interested in coming into the industry.

And so how can I get there? Help me get there. And if I know a little bit more by taking this course, maybe it helps me through the interview process. So it’s all those different types of students and from fundamentals all the way to advanced topics.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, that’s true. We have two courses available so far. one is an on-demand version of the Payment and Fraud Prevention Professional Certification prep course. If you’re in this business and you’re working for a merchant, effectively, you’re managing payments or involved in payments acceptance, that course is really good.

Payments and risk management, payments fraud management, all that kind of stuff. That course is really good as it is, and it also is designed to give you everything you need to pass the certification with MRC, the Merchant Risk Council, if you want to go for that. That’s one. And that’s how many lessons?

Russ Jones: It’s like 150 plus lessons.

Yvette Bohanan: Wow, yeah. So, at your leisure.

Russ Jones: Yeah, On-Demand.

Yvette Bohanan: So you can work your way through it at your own pace. A lesson is what, it’s like that seven to 10 minutes is what we shoot for, right?

Debbie Bartoo: That is, yep.

Yvette Bohanan: And there’s knowledge checks at the end of each chapter. So people can make sure they’re tracking with the material. They get the PowerPoint download in a PDF format. They get a couple other things, right?

Debbie Bartoo: We have a regular glossary. We have a resource document also to help them because often you get through this class and you want more, and so how do you find more? Where do you go? And so it’s to help them navigate through the payments industry a little bit more.

Russ Jones: You know, just to clarify or add a little bit more color on what these courses really are. They’re video based courses with narration and slides and closed captioning and downloadable workbooks and knowledge checks. And we complement that by doing a monthly Q&A. So you can learn at your own pace, anywhere in the world, and if you have questions, you can still check in with us on a monthly basis. We just launched the on-demand learning courses effectively the start of this year and February will be our first live Q&A. So we’re going to be doing that monthly and we think that’s really going to help people to be able to learn at their own pace yet still be able to circle back with questions.

Yvette Bohanan: And people basically just Zoom in, kind of like office hours.

Russ Jones: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

The other course is the Payments Boot Camp Intensive, which is our sort of executive level overview of the payments industry. The fundamentals, the key concepts, the industry structure, how the card system works, how the ACH system works and how everything is changing because of fast payments and open banking, a couple other trends in the marketplace. But that’s a, a real good introduction to the payments industry.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, and people have really enjoyed that. It’s sort of like a boot camp light. Intensive. Light, but shorter, but, but yeah, intensive. It’s not really light. It’s just intense.

Russ Jones: The Intensive is in response to people who they really want to know, sort of the big ideas in payments and understand the industry, but they have real jobs, they’re working hard and they can’t really devote our standard Payments Boot Camp, which we continue to do both virtually and hopefully in person in the future.

Yvette Bohanan: I think there’s two different lenses on this material too. The Certified Payments and Fraud Professional Prep is really focused on people who are dealing with, I mean, there’s a lot of good background material in it but it is focused for people who are really in the merchant space accepting payments and what you need to know, the fundamentals of what you need to know for payments management, payment op type work, risk management, risk operations. The Intensive is a really wide, broad. You could be in banking. You could be a fintech that’s not necessarily focused on merchant stuff, it could be a B2B fintech, a bill pay fintech. You could be a regulator. We have all kinds of people go through this this material. So the Intensive takes a very broad look, but it’s a very focused way of thinking about it to get you up to speed quickly, right? I think that that’s a big distinction between the two offerings. Something to think about where you are in the industry and what do you want to really focus on. And the Intensive isn’t quite as long as the prep course, so not as big of a commitment. Anything else we need to tell people who might be interested in these on-demand modules?

Debbie Bartoo: I would say stay tuned. We will be announcing more coming up soon, because the intent is that we have this wonderful library and it’s truly industry experts bringing this core material together, that’s kept up to date to inform people about what’s going on with payments and to really get that foundation.

Yvette Bohanan: One question we always get towards the end of a workshop is, How do I learn more? So, besides on-demand, the workshops we do, Payments News, the books, Payment Systems in the US and Global Payments. Outside of Glenbrook. Where do you point people to, to stay smarter or get even smarter?

What is your favorite go-to that you talk to people about?

Russ Jones: Well, you do have industry newsletters, in all sorts of shapes and sizes and some are better than others. They tend to have different focuses. Some are very fintech oriented, some are card system oriented. Some are fast payments oriented. So you can pick a topic in the payments industry and follow it through different third-party publications.

Very, very broadly in core payment systems all over the world, you can turn to the central banks who, by and large, track and quantify and report on developments and volumes in systems in their countries. So when someone asks us about, help me understand what’s going on with payments in Thailand, one of the things you’re going to do is visit the Central Bank of Thailand’s website. And in English, it’ll have a pretty good description of the domestic payment systems in Thailand, the major developments and the key volumes in that country. And we draw on that material a lot when we’re putting together profiles of different payment systems around the world and we’re doing country level analysis. Very, very much appreciated that central banks do that. Some of them do it annually. Others are a lot more aggressive and they’re like doing quarterly or monthly updates. You can track UPI in India, which is one of the most popular fast payment systems in the world, you can sort of track it and what’s going on with it on a month to month basis.

Debbie Bartoo: I also think about the fact that a lot of folks in education also study many of these topics and write wonderful white papers, too. So it’s maybe going sometimes out to Google Scholar and looking for specific topics. But I think when we think about this industry, one of the important things is about being curious, and it’s not necessarily looking just within the payments industry, but looking outside of different verticals that we might think about that might be involved in payments.

And thinking about that from an innovation perspective too because it’s not always staying focused on what’s going on in your particular aspect of the industry, but it’s the ideas also come out much farther in other industries and brought to bear to bring new innovation into the industry.

Russ Jones: And, I would also maybe point to a lot of payment providers who do white papers and do webinars and things like that as a good source of information. The caveat there is sort of their industry wide view is very narrowly focused on what they do.

Yvette Bohanan: Right. Yeah.

Russ Jones: So if you asked a payments provider that’s basically working in cards, What’s going on about, there’ll be an acknowledgement that the ACH system is important to settle card purchases out to merchants, but they won’t really put it into context. So it is important to draw a distinction between neutral industry sort of education in that sense and vendor specific education, which can be narrow, more narrowly focused on what the value proposition is from that vendor.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, yeah, all the more reason to get the fundamentals down because then you can kind of discern all of that. It’s very helpful, I think.

Russ Jones: Yeah.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, great advice. Good insight. It’s that special time again where we have to sign off. So, Debbie, thank you so much for leading the charge and center posting all of the work that went into creating these on-demand modules. I’m sure people will appreciate it. We already have people signing up. And both of you, thank you for being on this episode, taking the time to talk about education, sharing your thoughts. It is something we think about all the time.

So super exciting for all of you listening. Stay curious. Be geeky, keep learning, keep asking lots of questions. There’s a lot going on in this industry. It’s absolutely amazing how much change is occurring right now and across the globe in payments and risk management around payments, which is much needed.

So keep up the good work. Let’s keep it moving forward. And until next time, take care. Bye for now.