Payments Views

Glenbrook

Prepaid Power and Financial Inclusion at Fintech South

By Elizabeth McQuerry on May 1 2019

Georgia is a nexus of global payment processing and merchant acquiring activity. Some two-thirds of all U.S. purchase volume is processed there. That’s a lot of debit and credit card transactions. But what are those same companies doing to improve payments for the underbanked? That combination of payments technology and financial inclusion concerns was the […]

ACH

Payments in Real Time

By Elizabeth McQuerry on February 6 2017

As the U.S. payments industry is preparing to enter another exciting phase as immediate funds transfer options come online, I’m thinking back to my interaction in the Fall of 2013 with the inquisitive team at Planet Money. Perplexed about why it took so long for the monies from their Kickstarter fundraising campaign to make the […]

Elizabeth McQuerry

Expanded Frontiers in Mobile Payment

By Elizabeth McQuerry on September 6 2016

One of the payments obsessions here at Glenbrook is understanding the ways in which mobile payment and digital financial services are taking hold around the world. Once effectively limited to the early success of M-PESA and P2P payment in Kenya, today there are a number of services underway. M-PESA itself, in around a decade, has […]

Banking Industry

Election cycles and payments systems development

By Elizabeth McQuerry on February 1 2016

It’s election time here in the United States and potentially big changes are ahead. Elections define the beginning and end of political eras.  Walter Dean Burnham, the distinguished professor of American Politics, elaborated a theory of party change and realignment.[1] Burnham’s theory noted that critical issues bubble up from time to time and their impact […]

Banking Industry

Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry is IPFA CEO

By Elizabeth McQuerry on June 3 2015

This week, I began an important new assignment. I am now the CEO of the International Payments Framework Association (IPFA). If you haven’t yet heard of it, the IPFA provides rules, standards, operating procedures, and guidelines to improve cross-border payments. It’s now five years old and moving into the next, exciting, and supercharged phase of payments […]

ACH

Now What? Immediate Funds Transfer in the U.S.

By Elizabeth McQuerry on March 10 2015

The Federal Reserve’s recent announcement that it would not build a new payment rail for processing faster payments created some disappointment for many who are unsatisfied with our country’s current payments system capabilities. In a welcome move, The Clearinghouse (TCH) has announced its intention to fill this void and build new real-time “rails”. There are, […]

Banking

A Different Type of Start Up: Payments in Afghanistan

By Elizabeth McQuerry on February 26 2015

Imagine a country where less than 10% of the adult population has a bank account and only about half of those account holders have a debit card. Credit cards are virtually non-existent. There are only a couple dozen banks in the whole country. Cash truly is king. Now imagine decades-long political and sectarian conflict that […]

Elizabeth McQuerry

A Central Bank Takes on Mobile Payments

By Elizabeth McQuerry on October 16 2014

Ecuador’s Central Bank has embarked on an ambitious course to launch an affordable and widely available mobile payment scheme.  In fact, it will be the national wallet. With some uncertainty, it appears that Ecuador’s initiative may be the second central bank effort to enter this space. Jordan’s central bank has launched “JoMoPay”, but for those […]