Payments on Fire™

Real end-to-end testing requires real-world transactions. Sometimes that’s not too difficult to do if you are implementing payments in your own country. But step outside your border, and it gets a bit harder.

People new to payments turn to logical solutions when faced with this problem. Can you call the acquirer? Won’t they have test accounts for us to use? (Probably not.) Can’t we just drip a few transactions through with a few live customers to see how it goes? (Sure, but you may wait a long time to run through all the scenarios you would like to see - and there usually isn’t patience for that in a launch environment.)

It’s tough, but don’t be discouraged. Mercifully, a subspeciality of payment providers has set out to solve this problem. And that is the focus of this episode.

Steve Semelsberger, CEO of Testlio, joins Yvette Bohanan and Drew Edmond to discuss the evolution of quality management alongside payments testing.

One of the existential challenges remaining in payments is the need to accurately authorize transactions conducted online. While markets like the EU, UK and India have mandated strong customer authentication for online transactions, the U.S. is the largest market where such stepped-up authentication remains optional. Only a very small portion of eCommerce purchases utilize the 3-D Secure protocol due to lingering concerns about imposing friction and delay on a consumer base that thrives on convenience and fully understands its chargeback rights.

The Payments Performance team at Stripe recently published a blog post noting that in their controlled testing of 3-D Secure, the impact on approval rates was negative compared to running similar transactions without additional authentication. We were surprised by those results and wondered what the card issuing community would make of that counter-intuitive finding.

In this episode of Payments on Fire, we decided to get both sides of the story from two good friends of Glenbrook. Amandeep Batra from Stripe joined us to provide the merchant perspective; Dewald Nolte of Entersekt, a leader provider of 3-D Secure Access Control Server solutions joined us to offer the issuer perspective.

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.

The new year is coming with lots of innovations for the payment industry. Some of them will impact some companies and/or all the industry, changing how things work on the marketplace. George welcomes back Russ Jones to Payment on Fire and they will uncover the lens of the game-changing innovations, including talking about the upcoming events and changes that really matter to the arc of the payment industry. Glen is a Payments Consultant, Analyst, Co-Author of "Payments Systems in the U.S.” and partner at Glenbrook Partners.

In this episode, Russ will discuss the Webinar presented by him and Yvette Bohanan between December 15th and 16th about innovation and payments, with topics like types of payment systems and technologies, how the different use cases lay out what's unique about each, variations and differences around the world and how the payments industry is structured.

You’ll also hear about core system modernization, systems running 24/7/365, strong customer payment authentications and several other topics. Let’s hear George Peabody and Russ Jones talk about what to expect for the payments industry in 2022.

Come to the Payments on Fire® website for:

• Expanded show notes
• Podcast transcript
• The complete Payments on Fire® episode catalog

The Glenbrook Education schedule

The process of accepting payments is a labyrinth of complexity, and payment service providers are the guiding lights that help merchants navigate this maze. They assist in deciding which payments to accept, how to connect to networks, and, most crucially, how to optimize revenues and reduce risk.

But what about the providers themselves? Is their work getting more or less complicated? We sat down with Trevor Nies (SVP, Global Head of Digital) who leads Adyen’s digital payments organization, to explore this question as it relates to pay by bank. We discussed the pay by bank landscape in the US compared to other countries and why the US seems to be facing some headwinds. And, more importantly, what merchants should be thinking about when it comes to implementing pay by bank.