Payments on Fire™

The payments industry is changing in ways that go well beyond new technologies and payment methods.
From how merchants manage multiple payment providers to what they expect from their PSPs, some fundamental industry dynamics are shifting. And as the landscape becomes more complex, the skills required of payments professionals are evolving, too.
In this episode, Glenbrook's Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond sit down with Lee Clifton, COO of Acquired, to explore these often-overlooked developments. The conversation covers payments optimization, multiprocessor strategies, the current state and expectations of account management, and how AI tools are changing the way merchants and providers work with payments data.
They also discuss the changing role of the "payments professional" and why ongoing education and industry engagement matter more than ever.

We've had over 35,000 professionals complete a Glenbrook workshop, and we constantly hear from participants that they were surprised by how something in the industry works or a specific data point. How people think about payment systems is largely driven by how they use them as an individual consumer, and also influenced by where they sit in their career.
One of the goals of our payments workshops is to add clarity to ambiguous industry terminology. We also allow ample time for interactive Q&A, and whether the workshop is in-person or virtual, we hear some questions over and over.
In this episode, Debbie Bartoo surfaces some of our most frequently asked workshop questions and lets Russ Jones guide us through the answers.

There's been no shortage of announcements, partnerships, and new protocols in agentic commerce. But when it comes to real-world implementation at scale, we were still waiting for things to take off. Earlier this year, we decided to hit the pause button on the topic until something actually happened.
While progress has been gradual, the industry IS moving forward, and many of the practical challenges we've been discussing over the past year are coming into sharper focus.
In this episode of Payments on Fire®, Glenbrook's Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond revisit the state of agentic commerce, exploring emerging consumer interfaces like Instinct and Meta Muse, access to merchant catalogs and data, and the challenges of turning agent-driven shopping into actual transactions. They also share their firsthand experiences making an agentic purchase through Meta Muse, and the industry complexities that still need addressed.

In 2025, Glenbrook's Drew Edmond hosted a series on payments performance optimization - how merchants get more good transactions approved and lose fewer customers to failed payments. Since then, Drew has spent most of his time inside subscription businesses doing exactly that work.
This episode is an accumulation of what he has learned about how optimization actually works today. And here's the short version - for subscription payments and for subscription businesses, an individual transaction success depends on a lot more than just the payment.
Tune in as Drew outlines a data-forward approach that spans every environment a payment touches, highlighted by clips from previous guests from the payments performance optimization series.

About a year ago, we chatted with with Tim Chiodo of UBS and Chris Kim of Capital Group about the investment side of payments. It's been a pretty volatile 12-months in the equity market since then - well-timed for Bryan Derman to welcome Tim back to the podcast and catch up on the market factors playing into the payments space. 
Listen in as they recap the performance of payments stocks, dive into the e-commerce market, provide perspective on the card networks, discuss merchant acquiring growth opportunities, and finish up with a lightning round on emerging technology. 
Transcript & links to charts from the episode can be found here on our website.