The U.S. is moving faster than ever into seamless, account-to-account payments. That means enterprises and their payments providers are able to initiate a payment from one bank account and direct it to another. Think payroll. Think supply chain.

The system attracting the most interest today is the ACH, a network built on batch processing and lacking authorization. Despite those shortcomings it has some enormous advantages:

• It is ubiquitous. The network effect matters for payments even more than it does for social networks
  It is cheap. Compared to wires and cards, it is inexpensive for transactions that aren’t time critical. And the ACH has sped up with Same Day ACH transactions now available

That lack of authorization and banking’s reliance on authentication methods of varying effectiveness makes these transactions a fraud target. COVID has only increased the fraudsters’ appetite for attacking this channel.

Fraud prevention in this context requires the use of data and intelligence to, among multiple steps, identify out-of-pattern behavior between counter parties.

Join Glenbrook’s Nicole Pinto and George Peabody as they speak with Eli Polanco, CEO and Founder of Nivelo, a company that offers risk scoring for ACH transactions to improve payment success rates and reduce fraudulent transactions.

Listen as she speaks to her entrepreneurial experience and shares her insights into the evolution of bank-to-bank payments.

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2021 will be remembered as the year that cryptocurrencies become a full time presence on Wall Street and a top agenda item at the world’s central banks.

Here’s a short video of Goldi pitching his concept

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Prepaid cards are the “apps” of the card world. Join George and Fiserv’s Head of Prepaid Dom Morea as they introduce prepaid’s twin modalities – open loop and closed loop – and then dive into how the gift card industry has morphed into a far broader set of uses cases. And plan to return for the next episode as they discuss open loop’s evolution.

Card payments have four modalities:

• Charge Cards. There are charge cards that are a form of very short term credit, you pay off in full the monthly statement
• Credit Cards add the option of revolving all or a portion of the debt obligation and, if you do, you pay interest on those charges

Both of these are products that we buy as consumers or businesses. And we’re paying with money we don’t have at the moment of the transaction. They are “pay after” products.

• Debit Cards. Debit Cards, on the other hand, are a feature of a specific checking account. It draws on funds that are available right now. It’s a “pay now” method. As soon as the issuer authorizes the transaction, a hold for that amount is placed on funds in your account.
• Prepaid Card. The final modality operates in “pay before” mode. That’s the prepaid model where funds have been placed in an account to be spent at a later date. Like debit, prepaid draws on funds that are already in place. In most cases, the prepaid funds owned by an accountholder are pooled in a single bank account.

Prepaid is used in two different manners

1. Open loop prepaid cards are network branded (think Visa and Mastercard). They can be used anywhere the network’s cards are accepted.
2. The second approach is closed loop. This is the domain of the gift card where a merchant has pre-sold an obligation to provide goods or services up to the value in the prepaid account.

Prepaid Use Cases Abound

Prepaid is big business. Go into any chain drugstore and you’ll see a rack with both open and closed loop prepaid cards for sale. For years, the physical footprint of that “prepaid mall” has been the most profitable square footage in the store.

The prepaid world has some very interesting dynamics. Unlike credit card products that may be issued to millions of cardholders and used for all kinds of purchases, a prepaid program may only serve a few thousand and may be locked down for special purposes.

The Apps of Cards

That’s why we think of prepaid as the “apps” of the card world. Prepaid lends itself to some very specific use cases and program types.

In this first of two interviews with Dom Morea, Fiserv’s Head of Prepaid, we cover closed loop prepaid and some of the new and growing use cases Fiserv has supported, often driven by COVID-19.

Here’s Dom discussing B2B use cases for closed loop prepaid programs:

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In our payments education workshops, we make the point that today’s fintechs rarely do something entirely new. At the macro level, our activities and the transactions they produce haven’t changed. We buy food and clothing. We pay rent.

But where and how we do these things has been transformed by technology.

A Great Time to Be a Fintech

Fintechs are the newer, nimbler businesses that are most often changing how we do things. We buy tickets online, get takeout using our mobile phones, and file insurance claims via an app.

Fintech entrepreneurs are busting old processes with much improved user experiences and “value for money” propositions.

It’s a great time to be a fintech.

The building blocks are in place. Powerful cloud-based capabilities are common. APIs connect these tools. Rich data and machine learning generate specific, actionable insights. iOS and Android give smartphones super powers. Business models like payment facilitation help some fintechs. You can even become a bank.

Multiplayer Fintech Builds a Winning Service

Individual fintechs are partnering with others to develop and deliver compelling new services. This is multiplayer fintech. Think of it as the fintech supply chain. The direct provider of services to the customer uses the specific payments capabilities of other fintechs to expand and strengthen what it delivers to its customers.

This approach lets the provider get to market faster with better capabilities than its competitors. That builds a competitive moat for a period of time. And expands the company’s revenues through a broader range of services.

Not Always Easy in B2B

The ability of these fintechs to displace incumbent vendors and processes (“How we’ve always done it”) can be hindered by the target company’s size and reliance on legacy systems. Their complexity presents a barrier. Dismantling it can take a lot of time and change management process support.

For mid-sized firms, however, the choice to shift to cloud-based service delivery is fast becoming a no-brainer. The work from home imperative has only accelerated the decision.

Prospering Despite COVID

We all know that the Travel and Hospitality industries have taken a COVID-inflicted beating. But not every company serving those needs has suffered.

TripActions, focused on corporate travel, just raised $155M at a $5B valuation to help enterprises analyze travel and expense data.

Join TripActions‘ Robin Gandhi and George as they talk about how TripActions has prospered in the last year with its travel expense management service that makes both the COF and the employee smile.

TripActions has employed those building blocks and partnerships with firms like Visa, Stripe, and Modern Treasury. Using the multiplayer fintech approach, TripActions now has a service that has rewritten how an enterprise manages its travel and expense management processes. For the employee, the hated expense report submission process can be virtually eliminated.

TripActions’ services could not have been built even five years ago. Without today’s technical building blocks and those partner-provide capabilities, TripActions could not have built its services and hit the market as it has.

It’s a good time to be a fintech.

Here’s Robin talking about multiplayer fintech:

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GPay is Google’s app for payments, financial services, rewards, and, is expanding its capabilities, its partnerships, and its ambitions. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and Yvette Bohanan as they talk GPay with Steve Klebe, Google’s head of GPay business development and Google’s Processor and Partnerships work.

Fairly recently, Google’s payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today’s GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

Way More Than a Wallet

A lot has happened since Steve joined us in July 2019.

GPay has added incentives and loyalty more deeply as well as added expense management with automatic receipt discovery when sent to your Gmail account or via the camera. The incentives can turn into real money.

In the U.S. Google has teed up its Plex bank account offerings in partnership with Citi and Stanford FCU (other FIs to come) for launch in 2021. You can already add bank accounts to GPay through Google’s partnership with Plaid.

GPay is becoming a very competent user interface to the banking services offered by the FIs themselves. Google provides the UX and the data that matters. The bank does what it does.

Does this disintermediate the banks or give them a new channel through which they can offer their services? We will decide but personal experience suggests the GPay interface has a lot going for it.

Google has added these new capability and consolidated others under the single GPay roof. Its ambitions now go beyond simply being a repository for payment credentials and loyalty cards with a sprinkling of P2P payments on top.

Exercising Open Banking

One of the major payments and fintech trends for 2021 is open banking, the ability of third parties to access accountholder data.

PSD2 has driven this in Europe and India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI), both pushed by mandate, enables a vigorous open banking ecosystem in that country. Google Pay, formerly Tez, has been a huge success in India. Of course, market pressure is the driver in the U.S.

Google is now exploring the potential for GPay to assume the role of “super app” along the lines of WeChat Pay or Alipay. Yes, that’s a big leap but there are hints of its ambitions. For example: Google has built over 100 HTML games optimized for low bandwidth networks and low memory smartphones, all targeted toward supporting its NBU (Next Billion Users) effort. GPay will be one of the presentation surfaces for these GameSnack.

Fairly recently, Google’s payments services were a disjointed collection of point solutions. Today’s GPay is far more than a rebranding job. Listen between the lines to what Steve has to say. The implications are many.

Read the transcript

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A Global Phenom

Realtime Retail Payments (RTRP) systems are a global phenomenon. These systems exist or will soon in over 50 countries around the world. Some have been in operation for decades. The UK’s Faster Payments system, operated by Mastercard’s Vocalink unit, has been in operation for over ten years. Still others are still in the design stage.

These account-to-account systems (A2A) have gained in regulator popularity because:

• They are fast. The receiver has near instant availability
• They are push payment systems. Transactions don’t take place unless the sender has enough money to fund the transaction. In other words, authorization takes place before the transaction
• User authentication is up to the financial institution
• These systems operate year round, 24×7
• They are inexpensive. Transaction pricing is fixed, regardless of the value of the payment itself
• They have rich data carrying capability
• Some include a new message type called Request for Payment, essentially a digital invoice message that prompts the payer to send money and smooths account reconciliation.

Still New to the US

Most Americans still have no idea there’s a new national payment system in operation. Or that a similar one will begin operation in a few years. Wallets like Venmo and the Cash App abound. But an entirely new set of payment rails? That happens once in a generation.

Some of those Americans, on the other hand, may have experienced what a system like this can do. Zelle is a fast push payment system that moves money between banks accounts. But Zelle is more of a directory-enabled messaging layer. The money movement between banks relies on older payment rails like ACH and wires. New Age messaging and user experience; old fashioned settlement.

Key RTP Characteristics

Payments geeks, like Payments on Fire® listeners, know that the Real Time Payments Network takes a different approach. Operated by bank processor, The Clearing House, the RTP Network leaves management of the user experience and the use case up to the bank, the processor, or the provider serving a particular industry.

The RTP Network provides:

• The messaging between the sender and the receiver and each of their banks
• Nearly instant availability of the funds into the receiver’s account (by network rule)
• 24/7/365 operation (ACH and wires take a break after working hours)
• Instant settlement between the sending and receiving financial institutions

In short: the RTP Network provides the plumbing and pipes. What it looks like and how it’s used is up to another stakeholder.

Members of the network are financial institutions who either expose the RTP rails themselves or sponsor third party access so that those entities can make use of them. Nothing groundbreaking there.

An RTRP with RTGS

One of the impressive features of the RTP Network is that interbank settlement, the movement of funds between the sender and receiver banks, happens in realtime. The two banks settle their positions instantly. Settlement happens in realtime for every transaction. That’s what a realtime gross settlement (RTGS) does.

Contrast that with a system like Zelle that provides instant messaging among the stakeholders but typically leaves the final movement of monies between banks to an overnight batch process via ACH. And this is net, not gross, settlement. The amount includes all of the day’s transactions.

The RTP network achieves its RTGS capabilities using the following technique:

• RTP requires each member financial institution to pre-fund monies sufficient to handle its transactions. The money to operate the system has to be in place ahead of time. This eliminates settlement risk between the banks
• Each FI’s monies are pooled in a single pooled account, owned in common by the RTP Network’s member financial institutions. This pooled account is held at the the Federal Reserve
• The Clearing House maintains a ledger that tracks every transaction, that debits and credits FI pairs in realtime for each transaction
• Each Member FI is responsible for making sure it has enough funds to cover each of the transactions initiated by its accountholders. Each FI uses another open loop payment system, FedWire, to move monies into and out of its share of the pooled account as needed.

A Maturing System

That’s a lot of background to help US contrast this system against the other four mostly digital systems in the U.S. (If you’re not clear on that, join us for the best in payments education at a Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp®)

The RTP Network is in its fifth year of operation. In this Payments on Fire® episode, Steve Ledford updates us on:

• The growth in member financial institutions
• The growth in transaction volume
• The expanding set of use cases
• Who is using the RTP Network
• How COVID-19 accelerated usage in new use cases

So, take a listen.

Here’s Steve talking about those new COVID-driven use cases.

For a snapshot of how the faster payments phenomenon is growing in the U.S. here is the 2020 Faster Payments Barometer.

Read the episode transcript

Find more podcasts, visit Glenbrook’s Payments on Fire® site
Read expert payments industry commentary at Payments Views.
Read the latest at Payments News. Subscribe here.
Read our COVID-19 Payments Industry eBook

Continuing our payments in fintech series, we talk about one of the major changes in the payments industry over the last few years: the installment lending phenomenon. Companies like AfterPay, Klarna, and Affirm (that just IPO’d and saw its stock double in one day) are leaders in this buy now, pay later (BNPL) space and appeal to Millennial and Gen Z users as well as the merchants selling to them.

These firms offer a range of installment payment options: three, six, and 12 month payback periods are typical. The interest rate gets lower the shorter the payback period and, for the shortest period, that cost is eliminated. The merchant pays for it as promotional financing. These installment loan options generally increase the size of the sale and, because the BNPL provider may take on the risk and guarantee the sale, they remove a measure of risk from the merchant. In other words, for multiple merchant categories, they increase sales.

BNPL providers accept multiple methods of payment: credit and debit cards and, of course, they may encourage the use of ACH as a low cost funding source.

For younger demographics, a majority of them without credit cards and credit histories, these services enable them to transact.

Sezzle is a player in this arena with a unique, very short term product that charges no interest to the consumer because the purchase is paid back in six weeks. The costs are born by its merchant customers. Sezzle has particular appeal to sub-prime or young consumers who may not even have a credit score.

Take a listen as Sezzle’s Chris Bixby, VP of Growth, and Glenbrook’s George Peabody dissect the Sezzle proposition and discuss the changing face of Retail in the post-COVID era.

Watch Chris describe why his customers choose the Sezzle payment option:

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Faster Payments: Fundamental Tech for Payments Innovation

Payments innovation comes in waves. And the wave that’s breaking on the U.S. – having swept over 50 countries around the world – is faster payments. Also referred to as Real-time Retail Payments (RTRP) these systems are fundamentally different from what’s come before:

• They are push payment systems
• They are new, systemically important domestic systems
• Risk and economic models are dramatically different than what’s come before
• They run 24/7 365 days a year. Go ahead, push money to and between accounts during your Sunday midnight snack
• Novel messaging and data formats open up new use cases and deep integration opportunities

Most important, these are “clean sheet of paper” payment systems built for the Digital Age.

Glenbrook has been working with these systems for over a decade. Our global experience gives us unique insight into how these systems are used and their real and potential impact on multiple stakeholders.

Why This Course is For You

If you are responsible for payment products and services in any way and you’re looking to differentiate your services, join Glenbrook’s Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan on this deep dive examination of how faster payments is fundamentally altering payments industry dynamics.

Here are other reasons for you to join the workshop:

• Smart, expert workshop leaders to guide the group through the materials, make it interactive, and love QQ&A
• A crisp look at what these systems do, don’t do, and how overlay offerings in the UK, India, Australia, and Mexico extend their utility
• A deep dive into how The Clearing House’s Real Time Payment Network Request for Payment message operates and how the RTP Network settles (it’s a very new approach)
• Workshop attendees from across the industry bring unique questions and perspectives
• The workshop description has many more reasons. Check it out.

Take a quick listen to learn more about the workshop from one of its leaders, Russ Jones. George and Russ take a quick, fun tour through why this course is different.

Go here for the workshop detail, schedule, and registration.

The Fintech Phenomenon is rarely about doing something entirely new. It’s about doing things in a new way that better fits the needs of the target market. The fintech model also enables the provider to reach underserved market segments.

Lending is, of course, the core offering of banks. But between their legacy processes, underwriting requirements, compliance demands, and more, they simply aren’t nimble enough to serve new segments in our evolving economy.

And the banking crisis of 2008 left them even more risk averse.

That’s left small business lending wide open to fintechs.

Case in point: the online seller, that small business that makes a product or buys wholesale and sells direct to customers through their own website and, for most, through marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify.

Cash Flow is Everything

Here’s where success can kill a business. If their online store and what they’re selling catches on, they’ve got a tiger by the tail. They’ve already invested their own money to get the store off the ground. But they have to keep buying inventory in order to fulfill orders. Where’s the capital to pay for that inventory to come from in order to do that?

As the founder of multiple small businesses, I can tell you that cash flow management is a daily concern. It’s no different for these Amazon sellers because Amazon pays out every two weeks and it may take a month or more for the funds from some transactions to hit the seller’s bank account. With cash flow “everything” for the SMB, funding business growth is a major challenge. To keep up, you have to reinvest to feed the beast. You take all your earnings and put them into new inventory.

That’s where our guest for this episode comes in. Keith Smith is co-founder and CEO of Payability, a firm that has loaned over $2.5B since 2015 to Amazon and Shopify sellers.

Data Enables the Model

Payability, sitting between the seller and the marketplace, sees massive data sets that help it and its algorithms determine risk. Given the volume of data, the myriad sources of these signals, it’s impossible for humans to do the underwriting. Machine learning can examine far more signals than a human can ever handle. So, as Keith puts it, Payability’s staff “trains the robots” to help the company accurately price financing for those who would otherwise be locked out this kind of business.

The Money Supply Chain

In the business of selling money, you have to have access to it. You have to be part of the money supply chain.

Drastic changes in the finance ecosystem have taken place since 2008. With traditional banks stepping back from small business lending, fintechs have entered the money supply chain, as the new distributor of funds, enabled by their ML-based underwriting and risk models.

The fintech underwriting sophistication has been a boon to traditional sources of financing, both banks and institutional investors. They still sell money; they just do it through the new fintech channel.

The COVID Accelerator

As a funder of online businesses that have benefited from the COVID-driven shift to e-commerce, Payability has prospered in 2020. As Keith put it “we’ve seen four or five years of growth out of a single year.”

In Glenbrook’s payments consulting work, our discussions with merchants, billers, sellers, and their technology parters have included this common refrain. COVID has hurt many but others, able to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the digital shift, have prospered.

Find more podcasts and commentary at Glenbrook’s Payments on Fire® site, check out our blog Payments Views, and subscribe to the best payments industry news feed, Payments News. Read our COVID-19 Payments Industry eBook.

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In a crisp explanation of account takeover and authentication risks, George and Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security. They discuss the findings of a recent NuData report and its experience with the sophistication of online fraudsters. NuData’s techniques are all about foiling cybercriminals as they bang at the front door of financial institutions, merchants, streaming services, and more.

Payments on Fire® listeners know that we’ve been taking a steady look at fraud issues over the past few years. Fraudsters have been pouncing on every opportunity, taking advantage of pandemic relief payments as well as the shift from card present to card not present, remote commerce transactions. If this topic didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Measuring and detecting what the fraudsters are up to and their impact is critical. To better understand what’s going on, we speak with Robert Capps, Vice President, Market Innovation, at NuData Security, a company that specializes in behavioral biometrics.

NuData published in Q3/2020 its e report on cybersecurity trends. And the findings are really interesting.

What They Found

The current scourge is account takeover. ATO is a concern for financial institutions, for retailers, streaming media companies, and more.

Attack method sophistication goes well beyond reuse of stolen user IDs and brute force password guessing.

It is an arms race of increasingly complex and sophisticated attack and detection techniques.

NuData and others have expertise in behavioral analytics, tools that detect, among other things, bots that are build to emulate human interactions at the account login page. The use of CAPTCHA is one technique to deter these attacks. But the fraudsters have responded, going so far as to establish call center-scale operations with staff endlessly filling in CAPTCHA forms to add the human touch and smarts in what are otherwise highly automated ATO attacks. This is human farming to get around CAPTCHA and other rudimentary defenses.

Financial institutions and retailers aren’t the only targets. In this age of stay at home orders, streaming services have become targets of opportunity. Parasitic use of streaming service accounts has risen as the fraudsters sell streaming service account credentials.

The Defender’s Balancing Act

There are dedicated professionals working on both sides. But the defenders have the harder job. Besides having to protect every door and window, they also have to keep it simple for good users to transact. Adding friction to a transaction flow increases the shopping cart abandonment rate. That’s bad for the ecommerce merchant and insults the customer. It’s a tough balancing act.

Part of that balance is handled by “step up” authentication based on the level of risk. A bank might let a session proceed to a balance inquiry without asking for further customer input. But if a new payee is added to the account, the bank might insist on sending a one time code to the customer via email or SMS.

Getting to Good ASAP

Providers of authentication services see activity from a lot of devices. Building profiles based on these devices and the many variables surrounding each transaction, they use the profiles to efficiently track the behavior of each in order to separate the known good profile from the questionable.

A technique to “get to good” faster is to pool that profiling information in anonymized form from across all of the clients who agree to participate.

COVID Impact

Robert discusses the shifts in fraud given the pandemic. As a percentage of transactions, fraud increased substantially in the travel segment. And for those retailers operating in the physical world the shift to e-commerce was sometimes overwhelming. That’s a story we’ve heard a lot at Glenbrook. Check out our COVID Series book.

Podcast transcript