Payments on Fire™

If you're an e-commerce merchant selling across border, you've got to answer a few questions: What methods of payment should you support in each country you sell in? Not every country is as infatuated with cards as is the U.S. And even if customers in those countries are using cards, how do you optimize your authorization rate? If you're not sophisticated about this, your decline rate could exceed 40%, a huge hit. It turns out routing transactions via local acquiring banks is one answer. But how do you do that? Subscription services store card numbers or a tokenized version to initiate periodic payment transactions. They never want to have a card declined because they, honestly, don't want to have to contact customers to request they update their card account info because some portion of those customers are going to decide to cancel little used subscriptions. How does a merchant mitigate those lost payments? Serving the e-commerce needs of merchants operating across borders is a primary focus of payments service provider BlueSnap. In this conversation with BlueSnap CEO Ralph Dangelmaier and Payments on Fire® host George Peabody, you'll hear how multiple discrete steps combine to keep AUTH rates high and costs in line. You'll also hear from Ralph, a respected payments industry veteran, his views on fintechs and the opportunities available to new players in payments. Come to the Payments on Fire® website for: Expanded show notes Relevant links Podcast transcript The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog The Glenbrook Education schedule

For a front row seat on payment innovation you have plenty of choices. Yes, Stripe and Square are based in the tech hotbed of the Bay Area and it's tempting to stare at their success. But a look around the world reveals the evolutionary breadth of how payments are made, regulated, and brought to market. India and China alone reveal how remarkably different approaches can scale to enormous dimensions. There's no better guide to what's happening in payments around the world than Glenbrook's own Carol Coye Benson. In this episode, Carol and George discuss her new book Global Payments and the Fintech Innovations Changing the Industry. Carol spent much of the last decade traveling throughout the world consulting to organizations on the impact of technology and business models on national payment infrastructure. The book is informed by the scores of discussions she's had with tech executives, the leadership of development banks, government agencies, and fintech start-ups. Take a listen to why she wrote the book, some of what she found, and her take on some of the big questions still to be answered. Here's how she introduces the book via video:

2020 has been an active period for payments innovation. COVID-19 has been a forcing function for digital payments across multiple payment domains. "Touchless" and "contactless" payments are now common themes of retailer advertising. And, of course, many other trends have accelerated this year. Fintechs, mobile wallets, the expansion of open banking initiatives, and point of sale lending are trends with impacts spreading across the market. 2020 has also seen the increased legitimacy of blockchain-based payments as demonstrated by central banks around the world consider and even pilot digital fiat currencies. These are the topics Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan will present in Glenbrook's Innovation in Payments Insight Workshop coming up December 8th and 9th. If keeping up with the changes in our industry and developing real insight into the key trends is important, you won't find better guides than Russ and Yvette. Take a listen. Check out the agenda.  

COVID is a forcing function for digital channel growth across the world as consumers and businesses reduce their reliance on physical interactions. We've seen usage shifts in how bank accountholders in Peru transact - from branch to digital - as well as big shift in payment behavior. We outlined a lot of this in our own COVID series on Payments Views. Many merchants have turned to online as a matter of survival. Many restaurants, for example, have added order ahead and curbside pickup as standard offerings just to stay in business. Our assessment is that, even with an effective vaccine and adequate immunization rates, we're never going to return to the same point. E-commerce transactions have increased, yet again, permanently. How much volume returns to the physical point of sale domain once COVID is behind us is unknown. But it's not going to go back to previous levels. That shift is an opportunity for many in the payments industry, including fraudsters, those unwelcome stakeholders. They are taking advantage of merchants who weren't prepared for their new or increased online payment volumes. We've spoken with a number of fraud management firms on Payments on Fire®. In this episode we speak with Eyal Raab, VP of Sales, at fraud management company Riskified about his firm's expanding approach to fraud management for merchants whose goal is to maximize authorization rates. Fraud management is complex. Merchant needs vary considerably. And what the fraudsters are up to constantly changes. Payment fraud management and fraud are both growth industries.  

You'd have to be aggressively disinterested in the payments industry not to be aware of its attraction to investors. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to dampen the interest, if not outright enthusiasm, for the payments industry among investors of all stripes. Actually, the pandemic has lit a fire under key industry segments like the e-commerce domain, digital banking, and disbursements. The dynamics of change pushing the payments industry ahead are only increasing. Incumbent Consolidation The payments industry has been dominated by networks and processors. While networks have remained largely independent, the processing industry has undergone tremendous consolidation over the last decade, accelerated recently by the giant acquisition of First Data by Fiserv. Scale really matters in processing. But that scale comes at the cost of agility because the incumbents must rely on the systems they already have and the ones they've acquired. Consolidation onto just a few platforms is hard. And that means incumbents don't benefit as clearly from newer technologies based on cloud computing and APIs. Start-ups Abound While investor interest in what are typically public companies remains strong, it is interest in start-ups and young companies demonstrating early success that drives early investors. These companies need cash to grow and equity financing is a primary source. It could be an individual with cash looking for a higher return on a portion of her portfolio. Family and friends as well as wealthy individuals are typical of "angel" investing. Venture capital is another source that often fuels the shift from proof of concept to the first minimum viable product and, often beyond, through multiple rounds of raising venture capital. Fueling the Next Incumbents Fueling the growth from business teenager-hood to young adult are growth equity firms that bulk up the business's overall capabilities. While a cool technical idea can form the core of a new business, it takes business infrastructure like a global salesforce, enterprise-grade financial controls, and more to build a company that can execute on its potential. In this Payments on Fire® podcast, George talks with Steve Sarracino, Founder and Partner of Activant Capital, a growth equity firm based in Greenwich, CT. Steve's firm is an investor in Finix and Bolt, companies that precisely fit his investment criteria. And he loves the payments industry for its past and, of course, for its potential. (Listen to Payments on Fire® Episode 106 with FInix's Richie Serna) Like those of us at Glenbrook, Steve sees lots of change ahead for the payments industry. And, like us at Glenbrook, he wants his company to influence and prosper from its evolution.