2026 is a milestone year for Glenbrook as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the firm. We also find ourselves airing the 300th episode of our Payments on Fire podcast – founded by George Peabody in 2014, nurtured by Yvette Bohanan, and now continued on through the hosting efforts of most of the team.

We thought there would be no better way to mark the 12 year achievement – and pay respect to what George and Yvette built – than to revisit the journey with clips from the first 299 episodes. From early episodes on digital currency and AI, to the fast payments evolution and financial inclusion efforts (and how could we leave out tokenization), listen in as Bryan Derman and Jill Wurst guide you through significant moments in the podcast’s history.

 

Watch the full episode on YouTube: 

 

 

 

Episode Transcript:

Bryan Derman:

Hello loyal listeners, I’m Bryan Derman, a Partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire.

As you may have heard on a previous episode, we at Glenbrook are celebrating our 25th year in business here in 2026; that’s 2.5 decades of quite a wild ride in the once quiet world of payments. As we like to say, “we were fintech before there was fintech.” It turns out that for nearly half that time, part of how we’ve stayed at the forefront of the industry has been through producing this podcast. Payments on Fire was started 12 years ago by our retired partner, George Peabody, who believed there was an audience for a medium most of us at Glenbrook didn’t understand back in 2014. But we love to let people pursue their passions at our firm, so the response to George’s proposal was something like: “Okay, go for it. Knock yourself out. Call us if you need anything.” Well, George was right – Payments on Fire quickly found an audience and grew, and when George retired in 2023, the pod was taken over by Yvette Bohanan who nurtured George’s baby until her retirement at the end of last year.

So, 12 years in we now find ourselves producing episode #300, and we thought there would be no better to mark that milestone – and pay respect to what George and Yvette built – than pull out some of our favorite clips from the most popular of our first 299 episodes.

I’ve also got a special co-host for this special edition of the podcast. I’m joined today by Jill Wurst, our marketing manager and the long-time producer of PoF. Jill is very well known to our guests for her hard work in preparing them for their appearances, but has been largely unknown to our listeners, so today she’s stepping out of the control room and joining me to help trace the history of our little show.

Jill – welcome to Payments on Fire! I can’t believe it took 300 episodes to get you on the air.

Jill Wurst:

Thanks, Bryan! Happy to be here. You’ll probably regret asking me to join you, since my first question was “Can I make a “This is Sparta” joke about Episode 300?”

Bryan Derman:

So Jill, we have so many interesting moments we’re trying to capture, so let’s dive right in.

Jill Wurst:

Looking back over 12 years, there have been certain themes that have recurred in our programming over the years. We’ve aired several recent episodes on crypto, which have tended to center on stablecoins in the last few years, but I think we were both struck on looking back at episode #1 to see that we started off PoF talking about crypto, which in August 2014, really meant Bitcoin.

Our former partners, George Peabody and Scott Loftesness, hosted Terrance Spies, one of our go-to resources on cyber-security to talk about Bitcoin- tossing around possible use cases, and where and how it may or may not be disruptive to the payments industry. It’s really an interesting listen and a great reminder that innovation and disruption is not just about technical feasibility.

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Episode #1 – Bitcoin Discussion with George, Scott Loftesness and Terence Spies, CTO of Voltage Security (Aug 2014)

George Peabody:

So here’s my take on those things. We all know that Bitcoin is media bait. So an announcement from a well-known, well-respected merchant, online merchant that says, “Hey, we’re gonna take Bitcoin,” ’cause it’s actually, as we know, it’s pretty trivial for them to accept Bitcoin from a technology point of view.

It’s great for PR and probably more important that the demographic that in their market owns Bitcoin is actually pretty attractive set of clients. They’re well above average income, technology adept. So yeah, if you’re a travel company, if you’re selling new high-end electronics and if you’re, those folks happen to be holding Bitcoin, that’s a perfect, it’s a perfect step.

But I don’t see it as, you know, beginning a sea change so that the, certainly the small businesses are gonna start accepting Bitcoin in any huge way.

Terence Spies:

And the alternatives for, you know, moving something like $40- $40 million for a transaction like that’s gonna be pretty significant.

So, you know, I think sorta cross-border significant payments that aren’t covered very well by the current system are done on an ad hoc basis is really where, you know, Bitcoin might start making some significant traction if it hasn’t already. ‘Cause I would imagine a lot of that stuff isn’t reported through traditional kinds of channels.

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Bryan Derman:

Wow, that reminds me I’m way overdue for a catch-up with Terrance. Pretty interesting to see how even at that early stage, those guys were in lasering in on cross-border payments and how the use cases they were talking about for bitcoin are also actually what we are anticipating for stablecoins these days, and we’ll get into that in a moment.

So, a couple of years later, we came back to the topic with one of the OGs of crypto, Jeremy Allaire, the founder and CEO of Circle, best known these days as the issuer of the USDC stablecoin:

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On Internet Money – Talking Circle.com with Jeremy Allaire (April 2016)

Jeremy Allaire:

Yeah, I mean, when we founded the company 3 years ago, we had a vision that money should work the way that the internet works, and that there would be new services and apps that would emerge that allowed people to use money the same way we’re using Skype right now, or the same way we use email or browse the web – global, instant, free, fun – and that kind of model that’s worked for how media works on the internet, how communications works on the internet, and how content publishing works.  Really, we thought that model could come to money and, at the time, there were a number of technologies that we saw that made that possible.  Bitcoin and blockchain tech was one technology that would be a kind of protocol layer that would be important, the admin of machine learning and artificial intelligence at scale made it possible to automate things that are traditionally done by humans in banks, like risk.

George Peabody:         

So that’s really moving away from being a bitcoin exchange and making bitcoin seamless.

Jeremy Allaire:         

Yeah.  So if you look at the product we launched in 2014, it was positioned as a consumer payment app.  It was positioned as a way to share value and move value the same way that we use email and things like that.  We never thought of ourselves at a bitcoin company, any more than Amazon thought of themselves as an HTTP company or Google as an SMTP company.  I think what’s critical to understand though is that to actually offer a product that mainstream users would want, we needed to have that fusion between the traditional financial world and this new digital currency world.

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Bryan Derman:

That thought process will really help you see why stablecoins have emerged so dramatically in recent years. We understood in 2016 that value transfer across an immutable ledger like a blockchain could be significant for payments, but we were justifiably skeptical about a synthetic currency whose value was not very stable.

Jill Wurst:

Almost 8 years after the 1st Payments on Fire episode, in 2022, we talked to Ran Goldi, at the time the CEO of First Digital Asset Group, about the huge expansion of the stablecoins business and how cryptocurrencies can benefit cross-border payments with small fees.

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Episode 162 – Stablecoins, Cross-border Payments & Interoperability – Ran Goldi, First Digital Assets Group (Jan 2022)

Ran Goldi: 

And it’s amazing how much money is out there, right now, and what I find super interesting and I’ll wrap up with this that, you know, when we started really focusing on payment in stable coins and cryptocurrency that was 2019 and everyone were telling us, you know, we should probably find another day job because it’s not going to be interesting and this was just after, obviously, the entire crypto industry crashed by like 80, 90% was, you know, startups were dying in the streets and basically today, fast forward two and a half, three years later, or something, I have payments companies on one side constantly saying we are going to this, we already have product managers that we brought just for blockchain right, the same companies that when I, you know, was talking to them three years ago, said “I don’t know, maybe you should find something else to pitch” and that’s from the payment side and the crypto companies, that’s interesting, obviously those who survive, again you know, hats off to them, amazing ride for everyone, the crypto companies now understand that payments is one of the, you know, largest If not, probably the biggest use case for cryptocurrencies wherever they are stable coins or not it doesn’t really matter, and we find ourself and I’m you know, I’m very happy to say this, and being a founder, I know, this would not last, so I’m celebrating this moment where we’re at this juncture where the hype and the spotlight of payments and crypto intersection is what we’re doing, so it’s super exciting.

George Peabody: 

I like the fact that you just said a bit overvalued, I think that’s big, very charitable.

Ran Goldi:

Yeah, and look, I don’t know I mean, I’ve you know, I’ve been to a VC, it was hard for me, because I really like building, I hope they know what they’re doing. I hope returns will come to investors as this bubble bursts. But really seriously, speaking as always, bubbles will burst, good things will come out of this and builders will continue to build, so I just hope that the public won’t be affected too much by this wave.

George Peabody:

Personally, I don’t know how that can’t be, I watch sports over the weekend, I’m seeing movie stars and sports figures hawking crypto and so, you know, what could go wrong with that right?!

Ran Goldi:

Yeah, crazy times. Well, were you watching it live or were you in the Metaverse?

George Peabody:

Actually, I don’t think anybody’s gonna find me hanging out in the Metaverse

Ran Goldi:

You know, I’ll save that quote, George.

George Peabody:

Go ahead, I’ll take that bet. Which is a lot like a lot of crypto investments.

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Bryan Derman:

Hey Jill – whatever happened to that guy, Goldi?

Jill Wurst:

Goldi himself made the pivot to stablecoins as First was acquired by Fireblocks, a cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure provider focused on building an enterprise grade platform for financial institutions dealing with digital assets.

But here’s our own team of Russ Jones and Ashley Lannquist fanning some flames around the stablecoin conversation earlier this year:

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Episode 287 – Fanning the Flames – State of Stablecoins 2026 (Feb 2026)

Russ Jones:

Just thinking about the major things that happened in 2025, what’s your top take on the key development last year, if you will?

Ashley Lannquist:

There was a lot of political tailwind in support of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies last year, I will say that. So the GENIUS Act was approved in the summer. This provided clear guidance to stablecoin issuers about the requirements they have, new requirements to 100% back customer reserves, for instance, and a couple other measures. And that provided some clarity to the market, the stablecoin issuers, and in general with the administration, there’s regulatory support in tailwind across cryptocurrency, including stablecoins.

That’s been a major development and there’s been continued growth in the market cap of stablecoins.

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Bryan Derman:

We also talked about stables during our mid-year update in June. While use cases are still emerging, most every major payments provider is now working with them.

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Episode 295 – Fanning the Flames – 2026 Mid-Year Payments Industry Trends Update (June 2026)

Drew Edmond:

Are we starting to see the fire or is it still mostly smoke? How are we seeing some of the the use cases emerging? Is it what we thought they would be?

Ashley Lannquist:

It’s still the case that almost all stablecoin transactions are for moving money, within… between crypto wallets of large institutional holders or exchanges or for trading within decentralized finance applications, for instance. However, there are still exciting developments in the stablecoin ecosystem.

We’ll see if these scale up to real usage. Um, and as you said, so many companies make announcements, and that’s been happening in the cryptocurrency ecosystem for the past 10 years. So w- we have to separate this out from what really takes hold with end users. But there are some interesting stuff going on.

 Russ Jones:

You can’t be a payment provider of any sort in the marketplace today without a stablecoin strategy. But, you know, to Ashley’s point, we’re still waiting for the real breakout use case. It’s almost like it’s, at this stage it’s like a, as part of the feature set. You know, we need to have it as part of what we do, we need to check the box for our investors, all that type of stuff. But we’re really still waiting for that breakout use case. And, you know, we still might find it.

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Jill Wurst:

Another topic that has been ubiquitous lately is AI. We’ve joked on recent Payments on Fire episodes that, by law, we have to talk about agentic commerce with all of our guests, but as you can see from the Circle episode, we were talking about AI as early as 2016, mostly in the context of AI as a fraud detection tool.

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Episode 40ish – Machine Learning in Fraud Management, Nuno Sebastiao, Feedzai, (July 2016)

George Peabody:

When a transaction comes in, you’re pulling up those profiles that have also been pre-built clearly, and then comparing them against what?  How this profile is matching up against the current transaction context?

Nuno Sebastiao:

Yes.  When I was talking about measuring, that’s the profile I’m talking about because a machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data that you feed into it.  So what we’ve also brought to the table is the ability to really compute with such high levels of granularity, we call it hyper granularity, a segment of one.  If I see a payment from a card, from an individual POS at an individual merchant, whatever time of the day from that card, I am going to compute everything I know about that card, that merchant, that region, that POS, that type of merchant, how does it compare with similar merchants at the same time.  Imagine if it’s a coffee shop, it’s Friday afternoon, how does that compare with what I’m seeing in similar types of merchants?  If it’s a coffee shop, do I have the same type of behavior?  If so, ok.  If not, why not?  It’s this level of granularity and being able to compute that in that very short timeframe that then enables us to feed the models and have the type of accuracy that we have.

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Bryan Derman:

We hit some of those themes again in 2022, when George spoke with with Ismini Psychoula, OneSpan:

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Episode 161 – AI-ML and Bias – Ismini Psychoula, OneSpan (Jan 2022)

Ismini Psychoula:

So if you are building an AI system based on the US population and you’ve collected data from US citizens it’s not as easily applicable to the UK on UK citizens they have different spending habits, different everything so that’s an important thing to also consider. Another very important part is to monitor and control AI this is an iterative process if you’ve gotten it once you need to do it again over and over again and also use additional resources for example there are tools out there out there like IBM’s AI fairness they are open source apply them to your algorithm see that they are explainable and fair and also one last thing is enhancing the awareness around the AI ethics this is a very new area and a lot of people up until this point think that with AI nothing can go wrong but as with any technology it can make mistakes so enhancing this awareness from the customer facing employees to the senior leadership teams is important to to be able to mitigate any potential mistakes that come up along the way.

George Peabody:

I remember 10 years ago how it was soulless magic, right. I mean, of course there’s some ais that are essentially harmless and very effective image recognition well not always harmless but yeah, I misspoke there. Well as you say that…

Ismini Psychoula:

Of course there are also AI systems that are harmless and if I get the wrong recommendation for something I’m looking at while I’m browsing it’s okay no big deal but if I get it on my credit application then that’s a different story.

George Peabody:

Of course you haven’t seen how much money I spend with a certain online retailer based on recommendations.

Ismini Psychoula:

Well, maybe it’s working way too well.

George Peabody:

Exactly.

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Bryan Derman:

So, no surprise that early AI efforts were focused on risk management and fraud detection; we’ve been doing that for decades in payments. But as we’ve entered the era of Generative AI and LLMs, the industry’s focus has shifted toward Agentic AI and in our world, Agentic Commerce. Here are some thoughts our own team shared on it just a couple of months ago in our mid-year predictions FtF:

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Episode 295 – Fanning the Flames – 2026 Mid-Year Payments Industry Trends Update (June 2026)

Drew Edmond:

Are we kind of still in the  discovery phase? Have we seen much progress on the payment side? Where are the developments looking on kind of B2C merchant agentic commerce?

Justin Pituch:

So we’re seeing some real progress in terms of protocol developments over the past few months that are really helping establish rules of the road for merchants, agents, and intermediaries. We’re seeing the conditions for adoption of the actual payment embedded in that agentic journey really coming into being.

But I think that the other side of that is that volume is a long ways off. So the capabilities are here, but mainstream usage isn’t.

Will Eisler:  

Yeah, and I’ll just build on the agentic conversation, but from the commercial side. The consumer side of agentic is exciting and gets the headlines and, as Justin mentioned, has made some solid progress. But another area where it’s starting to grow is on the business side in finance back offices.

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Jill Wurst: 

So Bryan, pushing onto some other recurring PoF themes, loyal listeners will know that we are somewhat obsessed with the topic of tokenization. It’s an important enabler of agentic commerce, and if you’ve been around the podcast for a while, you know we can’t stop talking about tokenization. One of our first dedicated tokenization episodes aired in June 2015 with George and Russ Jones.

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Episode 21 – Payment Tokenization Continues to Roll (June 2015)

 Russ Jones:

Tokenization is sort of, in the greater scheme of things, I think it’s on a pretty fast track in the card industry.

George Peabody:

I’m sorry, it’s just cracking me up that, the card industry isn’t exactly the fastest moving spot in the world, but-

Russ Jones:

That’s the context here. Like, compared to EMV in the US, tokenization is on a super fast track.

George Peabody:

There you go. Way to go. Okay.

Russ Jones:

It’s essentially gone from nothing to commercial deployment, full-blown commercial deployment in less than two years, so that’s a very fast track in the card industry. So let me just maybe remind our listeners of what the context here is.

This is issuer-side tokenization, as it’s sometimes called, where issuers are really trying to, and the card networks as well, are trying to really address the data breach problem by minimizing the number, the amount of live card numbers that are being stored in the industry. Stored by wallets, stored by card-on-file merchants, and available for, unfortunately, increasingly available for, caught up in industry fraud driven data breaches.

George Peabody:

Data breaches. Yeah.

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Bryan Derman:

We’re obviously aware of our obsession and even named an episode, “We Just Can’t Stop Talking About Tokenization”. Here are Russ, Yvette and our partner Chris Uriarte with an update from that episode about 3 years ago.

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Episode 214 – We Just Can’t Stop Talking About Tokenization (Aug 2023)

Yvette Bohanan: 

So we’re eight years-ish into actually implementing this, ten-ish years into its birth. Is it working? The promised land here is network tokens are going to… You can fill in the blank on a couple of things that we’ve heard over these years. Reduce fraud, make things more secure, reduce the radioactivity if you will, or the usability of card data. Is it working? I mean, I look at fraud statistics, Chris… We look at these fraud statistics all the time, Russ. We go through this in every workshop, and it’s going up.

Russ Jones:

Well, it’s sort of going down in some ways.

Yvette Bohanan:

The glass is half full, the glass is half empty.

Russ Jones:

If you’re selling risk management solutions, it’s a dark and scary market. Things have never been as bad in fraud as they are right now. Let me tell you, they’re only getting worse. Thank God I have a solution, right?

Yvette Bohanan:

Right.

Russ Jones:

The independent data seems to show that card fraud on a global basis is starting to trend downward, but we don’t know what to attribute it to. We don’t know if we can attribute it to the rise of those 2 billion Visa cards that are now being tokenized, or we should attribute it to chip cards in the US. We don’t have that level of granularity. So we have a lot of flags blowing in the wind that show that tokenization is helping. But we don’t have any numbers that say, “Because of these steps, this number is down 17%, or this number is up 8%.” We don’t have that type of number. And that’s really unfortunate. But the way the wind is blowing, I would say that this is all going in the right direction, I think.

Yvette Bohanan:

And Chris, would you agree?

Chris Uriarte:

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think just as we said earlier, there’s no simple answers to any of these questions. We certainly see benefits of tokenization in the Apple Pay, Gpay use cases for sure. I would say for sure that has probably significantly reduced card-present fraud in the US in particular where there’s still no pin associated with a credit transaction. And going through the provisioning of a unique payment credential that’s bound to a device through an issuer is a very secure process. But as Russ pointed out earlier, when you look at merchant card-on-file tokens, there’s no inherent authentication there associated with the token itself. So that’s not really helping attribute necessarily to a decrease in fraud losses in that particular use case. So because you have many different use cases here associated with tokenization, I think it’s difficult across the board to say that it’s helping or it’s not helping. I think you really have to get out the scalpel and dissect the performance of all these different channels and all these different use cases.

But I would agree in general. I think tokenization is good for the industry. I think that certainly it is a tool, one of many tools that we have available to us as payment professionals in the toolbox to help with a number of different things, whether it’s fraud, whether it’s security, whether it’s approval rates. And we just have to stay on top of it and see how it continues to evolve, and how we can best utilize these tools as the use cases increase and as adoption increases across the board.

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Bryan Derman:

Hey team, news flash: It looks like it’s working. We’re moving quickly toward a world where in a few years there will no longer be account numbers printed on your card. Pretty much everything will be tokenized. Making that happen requires a terrific degree of alignment and standardization across a global industry with thousands of significant actors participating. We’ve always had a healthy respect for the consortiums and standards organizations that make that happen in payments and we were pleased to speak to Oliver Manahan of EMVCo a couple of years ago about how his organization does that.

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Episode 227 – EMVCo: A Textbook Example of Collaboration with Oliver Manahan, EMVCo (November 2023)

Yvette Bohanan: 

So now sitting here today, you have seven EMV technologies, right? So we have contact chip, contactless chip, emv mobile, payment tokenization, QR codes, secure remote commerce or SRC as some people refer to it, and 3D secure. And you create specifications for all of those as part of the charter, if you will, of EMVCo and you’re in this engagement piece of your role.

So when you’re out there speaking with people, what’s the value proposition today for industry stakeholders to adopt EMV standards versus doing something on their own? You mentioned global interoperability, is it that or is it others?

Oliver Manahan:

It’s definitely that. I mean, I think it’s a couple other things as well. So we always strive within the EMV specifications to provide a technical baseline that then enables any party to develop and deploy products and solutions that support the delivery of safe, reliable payments. So it’s really like a toolbox.

And so, if in Canada where I domicile the domestic debit network needs to do something specific to the Canadian market and regulations, they can use that toolbox, similarly in the US market, et cetera. But each of those can do their own implementations. But so long as they’re using the baseline specifications, we do ensure global interoperability and global compatibility. So using EMV technologies, organizations can develop payment products that will work everywhere. And there’s also consistency. So organizations can develop payment products that will deliver consistent payment experiences. So people always know to insert your card or to tap your card, or if you see an icon, for click to pay for secure remote commerce, you know that you’ll have a consistent experience. And an underlying goal for us is always security. So when you implement EMV technologies, the organizations can develop payment products that enhance transactional security.

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Bryan Derman:

One of the things that tokenization helps with is fraud prevention. We’ve been talking about risk and fraud since the early days of the podcast and continue to invite industry experts on the show as the methods and channels for fraud evolve faster than anyone wants, from mobile and CNP fraud to identity theft and new AI tools used for fraudulent activity.

One of our favorite guests, and a guy with his finger on the pulse of the ever-changing fraud phenomenon, is David Maimon of SentiLink. Here’s a clip from a chat he had with Yvette last November.

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Episode 280 – Reflections on Fraud in 2025 and What Lies Ahead, with David Maimon, SentiLink (Nov 2025)

Yvette Bohanan:

Reporting continues to be a problem in your mind.

David Maimon:

Yeah. Reporting, because a lot of people are still ashamed by the fact that they get victimized. A lot of people do not really know that their identity has been stolen, so they can’t report an identity theft. Think about the issue of synthetic identities, right? There’s nobody to report identity theft in the context of synthetic identities.

And if you think about it in the context of the FIs and the credit unions, they don’t know what they don’t know if those identities keep sort of paying the bills and maintaining those bank accounts. It’s very difficult to track this issue.

That goes to the government as well. So much fraud happens on the government front right now. And to me, what’s scary is that we don’t even know how much. But we know that after COVID, there’s more scrutiny, more attention to the issue of fraud and the government. But again, how much tax refund problem do we have? We don’t know, right?

So in terms of actual losses, unless you have, and this is just me, and please feel free to sort of counter on this. Unless you have a systematic way to measure fraud and you’re seeing fraud losses with your own eyes, I don’t think you are in a position to talk about fraud losses, right, actual fraud losses. And definitely not on a societal level or a global level. Yes, you can talk about actual fraud losses for your organizations on an annual basis, but given that you don’t know what you don’t know. So hopefully that makes sense.

Yvette Bohanan:

It makes a lot of sense actually, and I think it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of that as an industry. People get too fixated on the numbers or they get fixated on numbers that are then used to create a trend comment. So it’s going up, it’s going down, it’s better here, it’s worse there. And it’s like, what are you using to actually say that?

And when you start to peel it back, the numbers aren’t as comforting or carefully tuned in as needed or fully reported, as you’re saying with reports. And we’re always kind of just chatting about how novel it is to some industries that fraud is even occurring, right?

So this whole notion of you don’t know what you don’t know, you are constantly talking to groups that are uncovering the fact that there’s fraud somewhere, and they didn’t realize that they were being used perhaps.

David Maimon:

I think you hundred percent correct. And I think, again, the fixation for those numbers, like the actual losses come from our ability to understand what we can sort of write off and our risk tolerance. And I definitely get that, right? We want to make sure that ROI and you know, some money will be lost for fraud, right? But we don’t want to sort of create friction that then will result in us losing customers and more money, right? But think about it that way.

I mean, what essentially do we do when we write fraud off, right? In a way, we fuel the ecosystem, the online fraud ecosystem, with a level of tolerance that tells them, that tell the fraudsters, nobody cares, right. And we will continue to experiment.

So to me, if you haven’t met the threshold yet and you continue to write fraud off, at some point you will. We’ve seen that historically with different types of frauds out there, right?

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Jill Wurst:

Risk can potentially increase the faster payments move. Whether we’re using the terms “fast”, “real-time”, or “instant”, we’ve been exploring faster payments since Episode 10, when George Peabody sat down with former partner Carol Coye Benson to discuss The Clearing House’s announced plans for a multi-year effort that culminated in the creation of in their fast payments network, RTP®.

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Episode 10 – On Faster Payments in the U.S. (Oct 2014)

Carol Coye Benson:  

But here’s what I think you need to make faster payments infrastructure work in a country. First of all, critically, you need ubiquity. You need anyone with, at a minimum, anyone with a bank account to be able to pay anyone else with a bank account, consumer or business, um, regardless of what provider that counterparty is using. And I would love to expand that definition to say anybody with a payment account, bank or non-bank, can pay anybody else with a payment account, bank or non-bank. So that’s a first.

Second, those of you who know me, know that I’m kind of a nut in talking about brand in payment systems. And here I mean a sort of small B brand. There has to be a common terminology that everybody recognizes for this payment system so that, you know, it can’t be that my provider is calling it Super Pay, and your provider is calling it Wonder Pay. And I’m trying to talk to you and tell you how I’m gonna send you the money, and we’re in a complete confusion because we’re using different terminology. So you need some national terminology.

George Peabody:

The system has to become a verb.

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Bryan Derman:

You know, Jill, I really miss speaking to Carol on a daily basis, though we do manage to catch up every few months and she remains active around the payments ecosystem. She played a big role in getting Glenbrook to take a more global perspective on payments, especially around financial inclusion within emerging markets.

Jill Wurst:

Carol is the best – we actually live in the same city! Of course the runaway success in real-time payments is the Pix system in Brazil. It’s a major innovation in the payments space but more fundamentally, it has become a driver of financial inclusion in that country. Yvette spoke with Carlos Brandt of the Central Bank of Brazil about this a while back as part of a 3-episode series on Pix.

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Episode 198 – The Rapid Rise and Bright Future of Pix with Carlos Brandt, Head of Management and Operations for Pix at the Central Bank of Brazil – Pix Series #3 (April 2023)

Carlos Brandt:

So we have now, for example, 133 million Pix users in Brazil, which accounts for more than 80% of the adult population in Brazil. And out of this 133 million Pix users, 64 million users, or almost half of them, made its first digital transactions with Pix. And of course, this, that means financial inclusion. So the people that were excluded or underserved, they are now into the system.

And of course, these people, now they have access not only to payment, but they now have access to other financial products, like credit, like insurance, like investments. So putting here a different perspective or another way to see how financial inclusion is good for the country, the access of these people to different financial products, that means more business for the financial institution, for FinTech. So Pix is not only being good for the people that are being included, but it’s being good for the financial system, for the institution. So it’s being a booster for business and the financial system.

And more than that, Pix is also promoting digital inclusion. And many of these people, they had access in mobile phone and internet, as I said, but they didn’t have a way to pay online. So they couldn’t, for example, buy from a food delivery app, or for a rideshare app online, to payment and so on. And with Pix, these people now have the digital inclusion, so they can buy whatever they want. They can subscribe for a music streaming, for example.

So just like it is being good for the financial system, meaning the financial institutions, and it’s in fact getting more business, that this digital inclusion is also bringing more business for many companies in the real economy. So we like to take this wide look at the financial system or the benefits the financial inclusion brings to the system and for the country.

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Bryan Derman:

The clearest success story in US real-time payments, which is probably underpublicized, is the Zelle system, which mainly carries P2P traffic. We recently sat down with Preston McCaskill, Chief Operating Officer for Zelle, an open loop fast payments network owned and operated by Early Warning Services, to discuss the network’s growth, settlement process and alias directory, and expanding use cases.

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Episode 294 – Zelle’s Evolution in the Payments Landscape, with Preston McCaskill, Early Warning Services (May 2026)

Russ Jones:

One of the things I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to maybe describe the settlement process that’s behind Zelle. It’s just sort of unique in the sense that there’s multiple settlement rails. I shouldn’t say it’s unique. There are other payment networks that have multiple settlement rails. But it sort of stands out as part of the real interesting part of how the network operates, I think.

Preston McCaskill:

Yeah. And again, right, that’s almost that secret sauce. So one, the alias directory allows us to know both the sender and the receiver and make that frictionless identification process really enjoyable.

The second secret sauce is, right, we’re not moving the money, we’re providing the messaging between the sending institution and the financial institution. And by being part of the network, you are agreeing that those funds will settle in near instant time. How the money moves in the background and on other rails is associated but not directed or under the control of Early Warning or the Zelle network.

Russ Jones:

Okay, so you’re using ACH, right, and RTP to do the settlement process?

Preston McCaskill:

Exactly.

Russ Jones:

Okay. Any plans to add FedNow into that mix?

Preston McCaskill:

Our goal is to grow the network, and if that grows the network, we’re agnostic.

Russ Jones:

Okay. You’ve never met a settlement you really didn’t like.

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Bryan Derman:

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 efforts, assessed the business case and drafted complete scheme rulebooks.

In a discussion last year, Sabine Mensah of AfricaNenda drew a direct connection between financial inclusion and the implementation of real-time, always-on payment systems.

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Episode 266 – Innovating Inclusive Financial Systems on the African Continent, with Sabine Mensah, AfricaNenda (June 2025)

Sabine Mensah:

The realization for me was at the time that there are over 400 million adult Africans for whom that is their everyday life in the cash economy, in the informal economy. And what it means for them is really not being able to fully embrace, the opportunities of the formal financial ecosystem and having access to more resources through lending, having access to safeguard their funds through savings, having access to protect themselves with insurance. All of these, sometimes I think we take it for granted for those of us who have access to it, while we need to recognize that there are a lot more people who don’t have access to it.

And for me, instant payment is the infrastructure layer that can enable you to send a financial transaction in near real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days, and for the person to also receive this instantly, whether it’s a transfer to a person, or it is a digital payment that you are making. So, that’s where I see an opportunity for us to collectively come and accelerate financial inclusion.

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Bryan Derman:

Of course, the major driving force in the global financial inclusion movement for a couple of decades now has been the Gates Foundation. We were very excited last year to welcome to PoF, Michael Wiegand, who oversees the Gates Foundation’s Inclusive Financial Systems initiative, and he had a really informative discussion with Yvette and our Associate Partner, Joanna Wisniecka. While inclusion has always focused on people of lesser means, Michael noted that in recent years we’ve also sharpened our focus on the gender issues that affect financial inclusion.

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Episode 263 – Driving Digital Financial Inclusion: The Journey We’re On and the Road Ahead – Michael Wiegand, Gates Foundation (May 2025)

Yvette Bohanan:

We’re talking about and we’re dancing around this idea of inclusion a lot here in this conversation. Joanna came in with inclusive instant payment systems, which inclusive IPS is what we say now. When we hit instant payment systems, because there were a lot of names for it, but we hit on instant payment systems, then we went into inclusive payment systems.

What caused that pivot to specifically call that out and what has that done? What were you exactly trying to achieve there? I think this is really important. You’re touching on this growth and bringing people in, but what does it mean exactly?

Michael Wiegand:

So I’ll answer that in two ways. So, broadly, in terms of our strategy, we actually changed our name recently, but back from 2011 when we launched our digital strategy, it really was about inclusive financial systems and that sort of three key dimensions. It’s inclusive and it works both for rich and poor, for urban and rural, and for men and women.

And across each of those dimensions, there are very particular challenges and opportunities that need to be very intentionally addressed. Rich and poor, it’s largely about bringing the costs. Urban, rural, I talked about the challenges around agent networks and things in sparsely populated areas. But men and women, is a big one.

And from the beginning of that strategy, the team articulated an objective to reduce that to completely close the gender gap, right? So there’s always been a huge gap between men’s participation in formal financial systems and women. And so we set that objective and a lot of our work, including helping governments fund social protection payments, is an important lever to reducing that gender gap, but you need to do a lot more.

Yvette Bohanan:

I love the dimensions that you called out on this of how you were thinking about inclusion when you started the program. I think by putting inclusive in front of the payment system noun itself, it really creates that intentionality. Because a lot of people would shrug their shoulders and say, It’s ones and zeros, it’s code, of course it’s a neutral, in itself, it’s gender agnostic, whatever they would say. Right. It’s not. As humans, we come in and we write this code with bias built in of how we think things would work or how we think people are. You’re giving some great examples that really highlight the importance of intentionality here at the design level and the feedback loop too, right?

Michael Wiegand:

Yeah, and we had those debates internally, right. The, this is technology, it’s gender agnostic. And frankly, Glenbrook has provided us a lot of support and we’re working together now to further articulate what does it mean for a payment system to be gender intentional and really understand and then meet the needs of women.

Yvette Bohanan:

This is really work Joanna is spearheading here, but the fact that a foundation like Gates has recognized it and called it out in particular in parts of the world where this is not something that’s discussed very much, I think that’s quite remarkable.

Joanna Wisniecka:

Especially in the context of women, but applicable more broadly, there are certain foundational things that need to be in place to address barriers, and one of those things that comes to mind is an ID. Being able to open an account is the starting point, right, to entering inclusive instant payment systems.

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Jill Wurst:

Going back to some of our older payments systems, we’ve remarked a few times in recent years about the surprising growth of the 50+ year old ACH system. One of our Payments Views opinion posts is titled “ACH is Hot”, which didn’t escape the notice of Michael Herd of Nacha, the rulemarking body for the ACH system.

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Episode 184 – Talking ACH with Michael Herd, Nacha (Nov 2022)

George Peabody:

So Mike, let’s start off with the state of ACH. And we’d love to, of course, we want to hear more about the recent rule making because that is such a big impact and we’ll talk about some availability issues, but ACH is hot. We’re chuckling because ACH as a technology’s been around for decades, so what’s going on?

Michael Herd:

Yeah, well I think you all created that catchphrase, ACH is hot, I loved it. I loved it when I saw it. And I think we crib that from you all. I think we use that on our own presentations now, ACH is hot. But look, the last 10 years or so have really been a golden age of sorts for the ACH in terms of adoption and payment volume. Even before the recent pandemic era, annual ACH volume growth has been accelerating. Driven by things such as direct deposit, payroll, and other uses consumer bill payments, and account to account transfers, and also by business to business payments. And then you take the events of the last couple years, 2020 and 2021 in particular, where ACH volume growth was into overdrive fuel by many, many different types of government assistance payments, the stimulus payments, direct to consumers, the unemployment benefits, the advanced child tax credit payments, and all of the various forms that went out directly to businesses, and medical centers, and doctor’s offices, and universities.

And the vast majority of all that aid was provided through ACH. And then, you add into that dramatic shift to remote work. And the corresponding dramatic shifts in choice of payment method due to the fact that no one was in person with each other anymore. It’s hard to do check runs and double signing on checks in the office when no one’s in the office. And so, we really saw some tailwinds behind ACH volume growth due to those factors as well. And this is primarily an acceleration of long standing move from check payments to ACH payments in particular and also to other types of electronic payments. And if we just saw AFP, the Association for Financial Professionals just released, I guess it’s a triennial report and the state of the use of payments by corporates, particularly in the B2B space. And I think just like we expected based on what’s been going on, it documented a very large decline in the use of checks for B2B payments and a corresponding growth in ACH payments for B2B.

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Bryan Derman:

With the growth and increasing sophistication of fast payment (or instant payment) systems, interbank settlement became a hot discussion topic for the first time in decades. We are observing innovation in this space to control liquidity and other settlement risks that emerge or amplify when funds are available to recipients in mere seconds. Plus everyone really wants to know, “How does the money actually move?”

Although Payments on Fire episodes point to a moment in time and a chance to learn from the past, many of them are evergreen and we use them to add context to our payments workshop material. An example of this type of episode is Episode 82 from November 2018. Carol Coye Benson, one of Glenbrook’s founding partners, gave a master class in interbank settlement systems that industry professionals still find useful today.

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Episode 83 – Settlement Systems in Detail – Carol Coye Benson, Glenbrook (Nov 2018)

Carol Coye Benson:

One thing that’s happening is the timing of the posting of the net settlement entries to the settlement bank account is changing, it’s happening earlier in the legacy model that I described where settlement period is a business day. Let’s say the day is Tuesday at the end of the period. At the end of day Tuesday, those net settlement entries are calculated. Most legacy retail systems have the settlement entry posted on Wednesday on the next business day. One thing that is changing is same-day settlement that’ll be familiar to the US listeners who been following same-day ACH settlement.  All that means is that batch settlement calculation is posted on the same business day rather than the next business day.  That’s an acceleration.

George Peabody:     

It’s sped up the old model.

Carol Coye Benson:            

That’s right. The other way things are accelerating in that settlement is that the length of the settlements period is shortening. Where in legacy systems it was a full business day, now you’re seeing it happening multiple times within a day, you know maybe three times a day, maybe every half hour, maybe every few seconds, maybe the end of the settlement period is triggered by the volume flowing through the system, rather than a length of time. Lots of different things being put in place and being talked about to accelerate that.

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Bryan Derman:

Several years ago, Carol also 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.

Jill Wurst:

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, the delivery of which has evolved with the changing industry. From our classic face to face workshops, to live virtual sessions during and post pandemic, to our recently launched On-Demand Learning program.

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Episode 49 – How to Get, and Stay, Smart in Payments (Feb 2017)

George Peabody:

Russ, let’s start with what the boot camp is and how it got started.

Russ Jones: 

These payment boot camps, as we call them, they’re two-day workshops that are designed to help people get smart about how the payments industry works, and I don’t mean the card industry, I mean the payments industry very, very, very broadly.  It really comes out of our, sort of, consulting work.  When we first formed Glenbrook, we did not think we were going to be in the payments education business, but what we found out was every time we’d work with a client, you know, smart people, tons of energy, and wouldn’t it be great if everyone who worked for them understood how the industry worked.  The context there, of course, is that there’s tons of people in the payments industry, and they don’t always have a deep background in payment fundamentals – they’re software developers, they’re risk specialists, they’re business strategy people, marketing people.  Our clients were asking us to help them educate their employees and get them smart really fast about how the payments industry worked.

It’s continually revised on a month-to-month basis, we’re updating the material to reflect what’s topical in the industry, what’s going on.  You were asking, George, how this has evolved over time, and when we started, we thought it was important to just explain how the core payments systems worked, and what we realized, after doing it for a while, is people want to understand the context, they want to understand the theory, not just how the checking system works, but why the checking system works that way, not just what is a chargeback, but why do chargebacks exist, what’s the underlying theory behind it.  So we, over time, evolved the workshop.

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Bryan Derman:

Spoiler alert: We will be holding an in-person Payments Boot Camp and an Advanced Payments Workshop in New York in a few weeks. Jill – what are the dates and location?

Jill Wurst:

We’re only 6 weeks away! Those are happening Sept 29-Oct 1 right in midtown Manhattan and we hope to see many of you there. And Bryan, I know you introduced me in my marketing and producer role, but I was first hired by Glenbrook to help execute these in-person workshops. Of course, that was in the fall of 2019 and I was only able to plan 1 workshop before the pandemic hit and we moved everything online for a while.

Since then, we have greatly diversified the ways our content can be distributed. The big change in the last few months was the release of our on-demand learning program. Students can take full courses like the Payments Boot Camp, or define their own payments syllabus with individual modules, and consume the material at their own pace.

Yvette, Russ and Debbie Bartoo introduced the program in an episode last year.

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Episode 255 – Glenbrook’s On-Demand Learning Launch and Behind the Scenes with the Payments Education Team (January 2025)

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.

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Bryan Derman:

And with Glenbrook’s education program also came the companion book, Payments Systems in the US. There are tens of thousands of copies in circulation, but I’d like our listeners to know that the 4th edition of the book will be coming out soon. We have significantly reworked the content and the new book will be almost twice the size of previous editions. Watch this space for news about the formal release!

Okay, as we reach the end of our tour, just a reminder that payments doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They get delivered by organizations – companies, consortiums, governmental agencies, NGOs, which need to exercise great leadership and execution. I collected some great lessons about leadership from one of our guests a while back. After chatting Point of Sale systems, former CEO and Founder of Shift4 and current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman shared his corporate culture vision with us.

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Episode 217 – Talking Moonshots with Jared Isaacman, Founder and CEO, Shift4

Jared Isaacman:

People is one of the hardest jobs in leadership. It is managing personalities and getting a lot of people to do things they would rather not do. It becomes even harder when they’re new to the organization and they didn’t grow up with you in the business or, again, completely different culture, different part of the world. I’d say that we have our principles in the organization that we’re trying to instill.

Yvette Bohanan:

So kids are probably the hardest job in the world though, right? So you’re going up into space. What did your kids think about you going up into space and what did you tell them about personal moonshots that you’re taking?

Jared Isaacman:

I mean, I certainly think raising kids is one of those things you can’t get wrong. But I don’t think it’s my hardest job because I’m pretty lucky, my wife does it at a pretty incredible level, so my kids are just awesome. But with all this space stuff, they really, at the time, Mila was probably seven, Liv was five, they, I think, assumed a lot of dads and moms went up into space all the time. I show them all the launches on the livecast which is now twice a week practically so I don’t think they really considered whether there was a human in it or whether it was a cargo, they just thought there was a lot of launches. I think that as we got closer to the launch date, they had a greater sense of what it meant and I think even what the risks are associated with it. They’re awesome. Everybody’s very supportive.

Yvette Bohanan:

Did they ask you what did it feel like or what did you see or were they curious? Kids are always curious.

Jared Isaacman:

I think at the time it was much more about Baby Yoda. The Mandalorian was at peak in late ’21 when I went to orbit so there were a lot of questions about aliens and it doesn’t come up a lot at all and it’s still… Obviously, it’s a very big part of my life today and will be in the future and they have their own interests which is awesome.

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Bryan Derman:

Okay, Jill, we’re back from outer space. And, thanks to everybody. It’s that time when we need to wrap up the session. Jill, thanks so much for pulling together so many of our greatest hits.

Jill Wurst:

Yeah, you’re so welcome. This was fun. It’s always fun to take a look back at all of the episodes that we’ve done, and we appreciate all of our guests for coming on and providing a little bit of that payments perspective.

Bryan Derman:

Indeed. We appreciate our guests, and as always, we appreciate our audience for joining us on this 300th episode, and we hope to have you with us for maybe 300 more. Love hearing from you, so please reach out to us anytime at [email protected]. So to all of you listening, thanks again for joining us. Have a great end to your summer, and until next time, keep up the good work. Bye-bye for now.