Time to Read: 3 minutes It’s truly remarkable how this decades-old, ANSI based, batch based payment method is slowly but surely finding renewed vigor in today’s world of “fast payments.” Clients at Glenbrook continue to inquire about how ACH can be leveraged for their needs and a key reason is that it’s a ubiquitous payment […]
Where Necessity Meets Innovation – Government Disbursement in the Time of COVID-19
Given the coronavirus pandemic and its pressure on governments and individuals alike, Glenbrook’s Global Practice has been looking into how emergency social disbursements can be made quickly to the most vulnerable populations. This is not an easy task for a number of reasons: Governments want to be certain that the intended person is indeed the […]
Prepaid Power and Financial Inclusion at Fintech South
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 […]
Innovation, Fragmentation in Cross-border and Real-time Payments
I’ve just returned from SIBOS 2017, the annual SWIFT convening of global transaction banks and all things associated with cross-border payment. And right now I’m in flight, heading to the payments industry grail otherwise known as Money 20/20 USA, getting ready to moderate a cool event on Wednesday morning. Oooph, this industry’s fall conference season […]
Payments in Real Time
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 […]
Expanded Frontiers in Mobile Payment
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 […]
Faster Payments Survey – Your Immediate Reply Requested
It’s been just over two years since we first reached out and asked for your views on the question of faster payments. There have been a number of interesting developments in that period – the launch of FAST in Singapore, the announcement of the New Payments Platform in Australia, development of an instant payment scheme […]
Election cycles and payments systems development
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 […]
Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry is IPFA CEO
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 […]
Now What? Immediate Funds Transfer in the U.S.
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, […]