Payments on Fire™

There's been no shortage of announcements, partnerships, and new protocols in agentic commerce. But when it comes to real-world implementation at scale, we were still waiting for things to take off. Earlier this year, we decided to hit the pause button on the topic until something actually happened.

While progress has been gradual, the industry IS moving forward, and many of the practical challenges we've been discussing over the p...

In 2025, Glenbrook's Drew Edmond hosted a series on payments performance optimization - how merchants get more good transactions approved and lose fewer customers to failed payments. Since then, Drew has spent most of his time inside subscription businesses doing exactly that work.

This episode is an accumulation of what he has learned about how optimization actually works today. And here's the short version - for subscription paym...

About a year ago, we chatted with with Tim Chiodo of UBS and Chris Kim of Capital Group about the investment side of payments. It's been a pretty volatile 12-months in the equity market since then - well-timed for Bryan Derman to welcome Tim back to the podcast and catch up on the market factors playing into the payments space. 

Listen in as they recap the ...

As with many institutions, the European Central Bank is considering how to modernize central bank money. One way to do this is to issue a retail CBDC or central bank digital currency. This would make a digital version of central bank money available to the public. A retail CBDC would complement the physical form of widely available central bank money that we know and love today, which is physical cash or banknotes.

Many central ban...

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 ...

Glenbrook's Chris Uriarte and Samantha Gordon continue their global payments regulation series with Scott McInnes, Partner at Bird & Bird, focusing on the European Union. 

Tune in as they explore the EU's highly regulated landscape, the challenges of inconsistent national enforcement across 27 member states, and developments on current regulatory topics:

• Payment Services Directive - PSD2 to PSD3 evolution
• Payment Serv...

Kicking off a series of regulation-related episodes, Duncan Douglass, payments attorney and Partner at Alston & Bird LLP, joins Chris Uriarte and Samantha Gordon to turn the confusing and sometimes tedious topic of US payments regulation into an entertaining and enlightening update.

The conversation begins with who actually regulates payments in the US and how US payments oversight differs from the UK and EU, then flows into de...

Drew Edmond and Chris Uriarte chat with Nikhil Konduru, Chief Commercial Officer at Lithic, to discuss modern card issuing infrastructure and where the market is headed.

They break down the issuing stack and discuss issuer-side tools to improve authorization outcomes, reduce fraud and servicing costs, and increase transparency. The conversation also covers cross-border approval and economics, and explores agentic commerce via Nikhi...

Going global with your payments strategy requires far more than choosing a single payment provider: companies must weigh local acquiring versus cross-border acquiring, country-by-country payment preferences, entity structure, tax implications, compliance requirements, authorization performance, currency handling, and provider coverage.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte joins Glenbrook colleagues Samantha Gordon, Simon Skinner, and Dre...

The Glenbrook team is taking stock in June 2026 to see how the predictions from our January episode are holding up. Tune in for updates on trending topics in payments, including agentic commerce, stablecoins, cross-border and instant payments, risk and fraud, and the regulatory landscape. We also share insights on the "hot off the presses" news on tokenized deposits and the Visa/Mastercard interchang...

In this episode, Russ Jones welcomes Preston McCaskill, Chief Operating Officer for Zelle, an open loop fast payments network owned and operated by Early Warning Services that moves money directly between two bank accounts in the US.

Listen in as they discuss network's growth into small business payments, the onboarding process for financial institutions, and Zelle's settlement process and alias directory. They also cover expanding...

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX, to talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions.

Listen in as they cover some of the biggest topics shaping the next phase of global payments, including Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, payment opt...

This episode is a follow-up to our 2024 discussion with Stripe and Entersekt on the use of 3-D Secure (3DS) in markets where strong customer authentication is not mandated, particularly the United States. That earlier conversation was grounded in Stripe's analysis of US 3DS transactions and explored a counterintuitive but important finding: when 3DS is deployed selectively in unregulated markets, its presence can become correlated...

In this episode, Chris Uriarte welcomes Keith Briscoe, VP, Advocacy and Education at the Merchant Risk Council, and Allan Shearer, Executive Director, Head of TMT Relationship Management at J.P. Morgan, to focus on the evolution of card network fraud monitoring programs, and in particular, VAMP, Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program, which combines fraud and dispute metrics to better manage risk at both merchant and acqui...

Over the past several episodes, we've been building a conversation about how stablecoins are reshaping the global payments landscape. These conversations surfaced something important: this isn't just a technology story. It's a story about access. And there's another critical piece of the puzzle: the infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments actually work on the ground in emerging markets.

In this episode, Chris Maurice, the CEO...

It's an auspicious year and month for us at Glenbrook as on March 1, 2026 we mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of our firm, celebrating a quarter-century of pushing forward the frontiers of payments knowledge and strategy and our continuing efforts to build the broader global payments community.

A lot has happened in payments over the last 25 years and there could be no better way to celebrate the ...

Trust is fundamental to payments.

Gaining and maintaining trust in the payments ecosystem has always been challenging, but it becomes increasingly difficult as the industry rapidly advances and innovates. How does our trust model evolve when we move from a world where consumers are always virtually or physically present to make a purchase to a new world where robots are doing their bidding?

In this episode of Payments on Fire, Chri...