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.

While “paying into” a company comes with nuance and complexity, it’s really nothing compared to what is involved when a business attempts to make an outgoing payment.

Most of us don’t think very much about these “payouts”. It’s been the domain of ERP software for decades, often an asterisk mentioning “supported payments”. Whether you are talking about B2B payments, expense reimbursements, or mass disbursements to gig workers, payouts started having a moment a few years ago.

Manish Vrishaketu, Chief Customer and Operations Officer at Tipalti, joins us for this episode to dive into why payouts have been overlooked for so long, what makes them challenging to master, and what is happening that may make things better and easier for a “niche” specialization in our industry that happens to be incredibly important for every company on the planet.

It’s September 2024, and this month, we’re focusing on business-to-business payments. B2B payments are difficult because so much information must be exchanged for them to process efficiently. But there’s more to it than that.

B2B payments are many things to many people - for finance teams, they are “payables”; for gig economy companies, they are “payouts”; for providers, like insurance companies, they are “claims payments.” The list goes on - and within each of these sub-categories, there are niggling nuances that are requirements for making these payments streamlined and affordable.

For today’s episode, we pulled a favorite from our vault - number 146, a discussion between George Peabody and Robin Gandhi. Since this aired in March of 2021, Robin has moved to a post as Chief Product Officer at Nium, and TripActions has rebranded to Navan. But the underlying ideas discussed regarding B2B are still important - and this idea of multi-player fintech and what it means for B2B payments is quite relevant.