What will it take - and are we ready - to “pay by bank”? Yvette Bohanan welcomes Eric Shoykhet, CEO & Co-Founder of Link Financial Technologies, to this episode to share his thoughts on the topic.
BNPL’s rapid ascent has raised questions about its use: Who is choosing to use BNPL? Is it helpful or harmful to consumers’ credit and overall financial well-being? Does it improve financial inclusion? Is it displacing other forms of payment at checkout? A quick online search leads to mixed data points and inconsistent findings, often based on modest sample sizes and extrapolations.
To answer these questions, we sat down with Kristin Carlson, Global Products and Analytics Data Scientist, and Zach Tondre, Director of Credit Risk Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who conducted a longitudinal study to obtain insight into these and other questions.
In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Debbie Bartoo are joined by Bobby Tzekin, Founder and CEO of Wisetack (and Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp alumnus) to examine how technology, consumer and small business demand, and banking are opening up a very large market in the BNPL space - one that has a lot of potential and a lot of nuance.
Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond joins Yvette Bohanan on the show to recap his experience at the PaymentsEd Forum in Washington DC earlier this month. In addition to attending the conference, Drew also spoke on a panel about “How collaboration at scale can improve outcomes” with Jordan Kaplan from Groupon and Jonathan Lee from Netflix, moderated by Tyler Heun from checkout.com.
Merchant adoption of EMV capability isn't a done deal in the U.S. Glenbrook's own estimates show that we're only halfway there. Few people have as much insight into merchant payment acceptance and the technology that enables it as Larry Godfrey of Global's Heartland Payments business.
Bringing electronic payment capability to small merchants is a major hurdle for multiple developing economies. In this Payments on Fire podcast with Glenbrook co-founder Allen Weinberg and George Peabody, we discuss merchant enablement in markets reliant on 2G wireless and feature phones. We take a deeper look at India's payment evolution in particular. Allen's observations come from his recent work in India and the insights into payment system success factors he's developed. Take a listen!
Payments transactions generate plenty of useful data for merchants. But wrangling that data into informative shape gets challenging, especially when multiple acquirers, gateways, processors, or other service providers are used. Each one has a different approach to reporting and some are (much) better than others. Developing a consolidated view and, as important, reconciling financials from different sources is a time consuming task for staff who need timely data on multiple concerns.
In e-commerce and mobile commerce the problem of false declines is significant, especially during the holidays. Issuers decline transactions that online merchants approve. And vice versa. In other words, the necessary process of sorting out fraud from good transactions catches good transactions with the bad. This poor decision making means merchants lose the sale and the issuer its transaction fees.
Chargebacks are one of the card system's great consumer benefits. If fraud happens, the merchant doesn't deliver on what was promised, or you're charged six times for something you bought just once, the chargeback mechanism returns your money or restores your credit. What's not to like? Well, if you're a merchant, a lot. While there are plenty of legitimate chargebacks, there are also consumers who take advantage of the system through "friendly fraud," the "I didn't do it" chargeback category abused by all too many.
Payments industry professionals naturally have a hard focus on the industry's own dynamics. So, it's not uncommon to lose sight of who the customer is and who pays the freight. In retailing, yes, the consumer pays, but payments is a direct cost to the merchant. With all of the changes underway in the U.S. payments landscape, merchants now address payments as a complex, strategic element of their business, both as a way to drive new sales as well as a cost component to be tightly managed.
