Episodes

For years, payments have largely fallen into two camps: horizontal platforms built to serve a broad range of businesses, and vertical solutions designed around the specific needs of a particular industry. But businesses increasingly need both. They want the flexibility and scale of a horizontal platform without giving up the specialized capabilities that come with a vertical solution. That’s where diagonal thinking comes in. Rather than choosing between scale and specialization, diagonal think...

The more banking moves onto a smartphone, the harder it becomes for financial institutions to create a tangible connection with their customers. Yet as more of the banking relationship becomes digital, consumers continue to seek experiences that feel personal and distinctive—from personalized products and luxury brands to rewards, upgrades, and exclusive access. That creates an interesting opportunity for the physical payment card. Far from becoming irrelevant, the card can serve as one of the ...

Fraudsters no longer need to reinvent their tactics from scratch. With artificial intelligence and increasingly sophisticated access to consumer data, they can test new approaches quickly, learn what works, and adapt before financial institutions have time to catch up. That speed is forcing banks and other financial institutions to rethink how they authenticate customers. One approach gaining traction is ownership authentication, a process that looks beyond whether an application’s information ...

The payment card was supposed to disappear. As digital wallets, embedded payments, and mobile-first experiences reshaped commerce, the physical card seemed destined to follow the path of other outdated tools. Instead, it has found a new role—not just as a simple way to pay, but as a platform of identity, access, rewards, and deeper customer engagement. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, credit cards accounted for 35% of U.S. consumer transactions in 2024, ...

There is a growing disparity between hype and reality when it comes to agentic commerce. This is not so much a critique of AI agents’ capabilities, or the infrastructure that has rapidly emerged to support them, as it is an indication that this model is still in its early stages. Many merchants still associate the term “agent” with independent sales organization (ISO) reseller agents, rather than artificial intelligence. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Hilla Peled, SVP of AI & Data Scienc...

Most businesses have no shortage of customer data. They know who their customers are, how they pay, when they tend to pay and, in many cases, exactly when a payment goes wrong. The harder question is what to do with all that information—particularly when a customer falls behind. That makes collections less of a data problem than an action problem. Automated intelligence can bridge that gap, using customer information to determine what should happen next and creating a more effective, individua...

Criminals are increasingly aware of the signals banks use to identify “good customers”—and they are using that knowledge to evade detection. At the same time, legitimate customers are adopting behaviors that were once considered tried-and-true risk signals. Data breaches and privacy concerns, for example, have spurred many consumers to use VPNs, a behavior that was once viewed as a reliable fraud red flag. The result is a growing inversion of traditional fraud signals: legitimate customers can...

When Same Day ACH launched a decade ago, the primary use case was for exceptions—such as in emergency payroll transactions, time-sensitive bill payments, and other situations where traditional ACH settlement timelines were too restrictive. Those use cases remain relevant, but they represent only a fraction of how Same Day ACH is used today. As organizations have gained greater familiarity with the option and recognized the value of faster settlement, adoption has expanded dramatically. In a re...

ACH may be one of the payments industry’s most established networks, but it’s far from standing still. With new Rules taking effect this September—and another significant change already slated for 2028—financial institutions are facing a steady stream of adjustments that could affect how they process transactions, make funds available, and manage compliance. Earlier this year, Nacha implemented Rules aimed at bolstering financial institutions’ automated push payment fraud protections and cultiv...

Instant payments have quickly shifted from an emerging capability to a competitive expectation. Yet many financial institutions still struggle to justify the investment required to support them. With implementation costs, operational changes, and fraud concerns to address, it’s fair to ask: Are instant payments simply a customer convenience, or can they deliver meaningful business value? In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Shankar Jayaraman, Director of Product Management, Real-Time Payments at Fiser...

Every payment tells a story about a member’s financial life. The challenge for credit unions is that more of those stories are now being told somewhere else. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) has transformed from a checkout convenience into a growing part of how consumers manage cash flow, budget, and make purchasing decisions. While these installment options create flexibility for members, they also create new relationship opportunities for the financial providers that offer them—opportunities many cr...

Even as agentic commerce, open banking, and stablecoins have captured much of the payments industry’s attention, one of the ecosystem’s most established networks continues to prove its relevance. The ACH Network processed 5.5% more volume year-over-year through Q2 2026, reinforcing its position as a foundational rail for the next generation of digital payments. Equally notable is that this momentum was driven across all sectors and segments, including commercial, government, and consumer paymen...

In the past, a community bank in Connecticut could attract customers through physical branches and marketing efforts, but expanding beyond its geographic footprint was cumbersome. Today, that same bank can partner with a single independent software vendor (ISV) and unlock a channel to thousands of customers across the U.S. who were previously unreachable. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, George Malesky, Director of Partnership Development at Qualpay, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Pay...

The gap between good and great gift card programs is widening. While most brands offer some form of gift card, the leaders are distinguishing themselves through more sophisticated direct digital experiences. Sometimes referred to as first-party or owned gift cards, direct digital gift cards are purchased through a merchant’s own website or app. As NAPCO Research uncovered in its 2026 Best Direct Digital Gift Cards Benchmark Report, conducted in partnership with BHN, direct digital gift cards r...

Trust has always been the foundation of the credit union movement. Today, that trust is facing one of its greatest tests. Artificial intelligence is making fraud more convincing, more scalable and more difficult to detect. As AI becomes more embedded in commerce, credit unions face a difficult balancing act—embracing innovation while protecting members from evolving threats. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Karen Postma, Senior Vice President of Risk Solutions at Velera and Suzanne Sando, ...

Customers no longer measure service in days or even hours—they measure it in seconds. Whether they’re paying employees, closing on a home, moving money between accounts, or covering an unexpected expense, they expect funds to be available immediately. That demand for speed is fueling the rapid growth of real-time payments, particularly those enabled by the Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Bernadette Ksepka, SVP, Deputy Head of Product Management for the FedNow Ser...

A payment used to begin with a person making a decision: swiping a card, approving a transfer, or authorizing a purchase. Increasingly, that decision is being embedded into software. As programmatic payments become more common—and as agentic AI expands their reach—financial institutions must adapt to a landscape where transactions may be initiated by systems acting on behalf of businesses and consumers. The opportunity is significant, but so is the challenge of ensuring those systems behave as ...

No one likes waiting for a check to arrive in the mail. Today’s consumers are accustomed to instant, digital experiences, and those expectations extend to payments. Whether they’re receiving a refund, reimbursement, or settlement, recipients expect fast, secure and flexible options. That shift is prompting organizations to rethink how they disburse funds, with prepaid cards emerging as a practical option for many use cases. By giving payees more direct ways to receive their money, organizations...

Many companies expect gig workers to deliver fast, reliable work—but the way they’re paid often tells a very different story. Behind the scenes, payouts can lag days or even weeks, get chipped away by fees, and disappear into layers of currency conversion and compliance hurdles that most contractors never see coming. This gap between real-time work and delayed compensation becomes even more pronounced in cross-border payments, where long-standing friction points persist: settlement delays, hidd...

As financial institutions merge and evolve, the pressure on back-office operations grows just as quickly as it does on member-facing services. Accounting teams that once relied on manual processes and patchwork systems are now expected to deliver greater accuracy, faster reporting, and the flexibility to support future growth. As a result, many banks and credit unions are reevaluating whether their current accounting platforms can keep pace—and looking for partners that can support both today’s...

Every bank wants to earn its customers’ trust. Today, protecting customers’ identities is just as important to earning that trust as safeguarding their money. Too many financial institutions, however, still treat identity protection as an afterthought. They fail to recognize that identity protection is not only a cybersecurity imperative but also a powerful driver of customer loyalty and engagement. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Javelin Strategy & Research’s Tracy Goldberg, Director of Cyberse...

Entrepreneurs bring tremendous enthusiasm and energy to building their businesses, but they’re often less excited about the everyday—yet essential—tasks like building the infrastructure needed to accept and send payments. When they do tackle those tasks, they usually discover they’re far more complicated than expected. That’s why more startups are turning to outside partners to help them build remittance platforms. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Avinash Chidambaram, Founder and CEO of Cybrid and...

Business customers today have more ways to move money than at any point in recent memory. The arrival of near-instant payment networks like FedNow and RTP has expanded the menu of options, giving companies new ways to balance speed, cost, and security when making payments. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Darren Beyer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Qolo, and Hugh Thomas, Lead Analyst of Commercial and Enterprise Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how the business payments...

Banking relationships often start earlier than most people realize—and they tend to last longer than expected. Roughly half of young consumers will stick with their bank into adulthood, and many never switch. This puts banks’ focus squarely on Gen Z, where the youngest members of the cohort are in their early teenage years and the oldest are already facing significant financial decisions. Still, many financial institutions have struggled to connect with this digital-first demographic. In a rec...