Payments on Fire™

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.

As with many institutions, the European Central Bank is considering how to modernize central bank money. One way to do this is to issue a retail CBDC or central bank digital currency. This would make a digital version of central bank money available to the public. A retail CBDC would complement the physical form of widely available central bank money that we know and love today, which is physical cash or banknotes.
Many central banks around the world have been exploring a retail CBDC, and the live examples include Nigeria, China, India, and the Caribbean, specifically the Bahamas, which was the first country to issue retail CBDC, and Jamaica. The ECB has also for years been researching and exploring this topic and is preparing to issue a pilot of its retail CBDC, the digital euro, in the second half of 2027.
In this episode, Nicola Branzoli, Head of Division for the Digital Euro Regulation, Research, and Technical Support at the Banca d'Italia, joins Glenbrook's Ashley Lannquist and Simon Skinner for an in-depth exploration of the digital euro. Listen in as they cover the objectives and value proposition, design choices and pilot details, and what the digital euro means in the broader European payment context.

2026 is a milestone year for Glenbrook as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the firm. We also find ourselves airing the 300th episode of our Payments on Fire podcast - founded by George Peabody in 2014, nurtured by Yvette Bohanan, and now continued on through the hosting efforts of most of the team.  
We thought there would be no better way to mark the 12 year achievement - and pay respect to what George and Yvette built - than to revisit the journey with clips from the first 299 episodes. From early episodes on digital currency and AI, to fast payments evolution and financial inclusion efforts (and how could we leave out tokenization), listen in as Bryan Derman and Jill Wurst guide you through significant moments in the podcast's history.