Payments on Fire‪™‬ Glenbrook Partners, LLC

Glenbrook's Russ Jones often chats with professionals working for companies inside the payments industry who are providing payments and services to end users such as businesses, enterprises, governments, and individuals. Or they may be working at an enterprise, a merchant, or a biller. And they’re all trying to figure out how to save money in payments.
In this episode, Russ joins Yvette to talk through 8 simple ideas about how you make money in payments.

Acquired by Mastercard in 2017, the UK’s Vocalink manages the UK’s Bacs payment system, ATM LINK switching platform, and the Faster Payments System, FPS. To make this more tangible, consider these statistics: Vocalink processes over 90% of UK salaries, more than 70% of household bills, 98% of state benefits, and powers 60,000 ATMs. 
Vocalink’s influence goes beyond the UK, with technology that powers fast payments infrastructure in countries such as the US, Thailand, Sweden, the Philippines, Peru, and Saudi Arabia - just to name a few.
Vocalink’s origin story, which began in 1998, spurred payments modernization efforts worldwide. For this episode, we sat down with Gregor Dobbie, former CEO of Vocalink, to discuss what we can learn from Vocalink’s journey and what the future holds for core payment systems.

Have you ever wished for a “payments sherpa”? Someone who would share their experiences, opinions, and advice about this industry - the uncut, “real real” of what can happen and what to remember as you move along your payments journey. In this episode, we sit down with one of our favorite payments industry sherpas - Steve Klebe. 
No stranger to our podcasts, this time Steve talks about payments partnerships. This is a topic Steve is passionate about - and for good reasons. Partnerships - the successful ones - make this industry go around. The right partnerships can make the industry better, bring novel and differentiated offerings to the market, and make the payment transaction easier, more secure, and more valuable to consumers and businesses. 
Steve has invested about half his career creating successful strategic partnerships for Verifone, CyberSource, Google, and more (frequently going out on a limb to do it), and he survives to tell his tale. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it.
 

As humans, our brains like to organize things - classify them, put them in silos. This thinking often works to our advantage - enabling deep analysis and understanding. Sometimes, though, it can work against us. We can be bound to a siloed thought process - a “this or that” false choice that causes us to miss the greater value inherent in doing both.
In searching for guests who will inspire us to eschew false choices in favor of unexpected combinations, we met Glendy Kam, Chief Product Officer at Tassat. In this episode, Yvette enjoyed geeking out on payments innovation with Glendy and digging into how Tassat is creating an infrastructure enabling $1.4Tr in payments for commercial bank customers. 
For all the participants who have been through a Glenbrook workshop and have asked about real-world use cases for distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies in payments, or are trying to figure out how to combine new and existing technologies to solve a problem, this episode is for you. Enjoy!
 

In this episode, Glenbrook Partners Yvette Bohanan, Russ Jones, and Chris Uriarte sat down with Julie Fergerson - a long-time payments professional who co-founded the Merchant Risk Council in 2000 and returned a few years ago to take on the role of CEO for what is now an industry-leading, global non-profit. 
We talk with Julie about how the payments industry has changed over the last two decades, with both the professionalization of payments and of fraud, and why she is now spearheading a certification program for the industry. 
True to form, we also had to share our hot takes on topics such as “pay by bank”, and the looming US Credit Card Competition Act. We hope this inspires you to think about your personal career path in payments and your role as a leader in this industry.
Be sure to check out Glenbrook’s preparation course to help you demonstrate your command of payment and fraud knowledge and get ready to take the CPFPP exam.

In this episode, we are exploring one of the “buzziest” buzz words in payments today - orchestration.
If you have been in the payments space for a long time, your reaction to hearing about orchestration might be “What’s all the fuss about? We’ve been evolving these capabilities for decades.” If you are new to the industry, you may think this is some kind of high-performance jet fuel that is painfully needed to improve a rather opaque transaction processing environment.
Joining Yvette Bohanan are two Glenbrook colleagues, Simon Skinner and Samantha Gordon, who have been digging into orchestration solutions. They will be helping us define orchestration, offer a perspective on who should consider orchestration, and for those of you who do, a framework for thinking about orchestration.