Payments on Fire™

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX, to talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions. Listen in as they cover some of the biggest topics shaping the next phase of global payments, including Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, payment optimization when looking at local payment methods, and perspectives on agentic commerce and stablecoins.

This episode is a follow-up to our 2024 discussion with Stripe and Entersekt on the use of 3-D Secure (3DS) in markets where strong customer authentication is not mandated, particularly the United States. That earlier conversation was grounded in Stripe's analysis of US 3DS transactions and explored a counterintuitive but important finding: when 3DS is deployed selectively in unregulated markets, its presence can become correlated with higher-risk transactions, limiting its effectiveness and in some cases negatively impacting authorization outcomes. Since that episode, several developments have occurred, including new analysis by Stripe examining 3DS usage and performance in markets where authentication is required by regulation, a substantial increase in the use of EMVCo "network" tokenization, and research and messaging developed by Entersekt regarding the continued use of authentication in conjunction with tokenization. Chris Uriarte is delighted to welcome back Amandeep Batra from Stripe and Dewald Nolte from Entersekt to address these developments and to explore how authentication and tokenization interact in practice across different regulatory environments.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte speaks with Blake Breathitt, Senior Vice President of Platforms and Financial Services at Adyen, about one of the biggest growth engines in the industry over the past few years - platform payments. Listen in as they discuss the nature of this interesting segment of the industry, the nuance behind platform payments, and just what's driving this platform payment phenomenon.

In this episode, Chris Uriarte welcomes Keith Briscoe, VP, Advocacy and Education at the Merchant Risk Council, and Allan Shearer, Executive Director, Head of TMT Relationship Management at J.P. Morgan, to focus on the evolution of card network fraud monitoring programs, and in particular, VAMP, Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program, which combines fraud and dispute metrics to better manage risk at both merchant and acquirer levels. Listen in as the group discusses industry reactions, data transparency and reporting challenges, and implications for enforcement of new thresholds.   

Over the past several episodes, we've been building a conversation about how stablecoins are reshaping the global payments landscape. These conversations surfaced something important: this isn't just a technology story. It's a story about access. And there's another critical piece of the puzzle: the infrastructure that makes stablecoin payments actually work on the ground in emerging markets. In this episode, Chris Maurice, the CEO and co-founder of Yellow Card, joins Drew Edmond to explore how stablecoins are transforming global payments, especially in emerging markets, by addressing liquidity issues, reducing costs, improving compliance transparency, and enabling faster cross-border transactions. Listen in as they highlight the challenges of legacy infrastructure, regulatory evolution, interoperability, and the evolving role of banks and technology platforms in this ecosystem.

It's an auspicious year and month for us at Glenbrook as on March 1, 2026 we mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of our firm, celebrating a quarter-century of pushing forward the frontiers of payments knowledge and strategy and our continuing efforts to build the broader global payments community. A lot has happened in payments over the last 25 years and there could be no better way to celebrate the progress of the industry and the firm than to talk to the people who played such seminal roles in shaping both: In this episode, we speak with Glenbrook's three founding partners - Carol Coye Benson, Scott Loftesness, and Allen Weinberg.  Listen in as they recall the early days of the firm, discuss how Glenbrook's strategy work expanded to form our education and global practices, consider the evolution of the "payments professional", and reflect on payments industry shifts over their years both in and out of Glenbrook.  

Join Glenbrook's Russ Jones and Ashley Lannquist for a detailed discussion on the state of stablecoins, focusing on market developments, regulatory and policy impacts, usage patterns, and competition from other improved payments systems. Learn more about the stablecoin landscape in our 2-hour, self-paced course, Stablecoin Essentials. 

Trust is fundamental to payments. Gaining and maintaining trust in the payments ecosystem has always been challenging, but it becomes increasingly difficult as the industry rapidly advances and innovates. How does our trust model evolve when we move from a world where consumers are always virtually or physically present to make a purchase to a new world where robots are doing their bidding? In this episode of Payments on Fire, Chris Uriarte welcomes Jenny Hadlow, Chief Operating Officer, and Rory O'Neill, Chief Marketing Officer, from Checkout.com to discuss the findings from their recent report "Trust in the Digital Economy 2025" and explore the interesting dimensions of trust that merchants, consumers, and service providers need to be aware of in today's ever changing digital economy.

2026 is set to be another dynamic year in payments. Join our Glenbrook partners as they discuss their perspectives on industry trends and what they'll be keeping an eye on this year, including: Agentic Commerce Tokenization Stablecoins Fast Payments Cross-Border Payments Subscription and Recurring Payments Card Interchange and Surcharging Regulation and Banking Trends Risk and Fraud

If you missed our Advanced Payments workshop in San Francisco last month, tune in to this episode to hear Yvette Bohanan and Russ Jones discuss the key topics and conversations from the session, including card network updates, stablecoins, and agentic commerce.  Join us for a live, virtual Advanced Payments workshop on May 12-13 for more updates and insights into critical industry topics, or deep dive into stablecoins with our new self-paced module.   

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Ashley Lannquist welcome Scott Southall, Head of BaaS, and Will Artingstall, Head of Digital Assets Payments and e-Commerce at Citi, to dig into what recent stablecoin regulatory changes mean for the future of banking, how U.S. institutions are mobilizing behind digital dollars, why clients are asking about new forms of money, and what's next as stablecoins potentially go mainstream in the American financial system.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan welcomes back Ran 'Goldi' Goldshtein, Senior VP of Payments and Networks at Fireblocks, to provide his perspective on the evolution of the digital currency space. Tune in as they break down a stablecoin transaction, discuss the current state and adoption of blockchain technology, and review various use cases for stablecoins. They define terms like TradFi, Defi, and smart contracts, and explore the impact of tokenized deposits and AI on the digital currency landscape.

In this episode, Bryan Derman, Russ Jones, and Chris Uriarte share their first-take analysis of last week's proposed settlement of the long-running antitrust litigation between Visa/Mastercard and a group of merchants regarding Payment Card Interchange and Merchant Discounts. The discussion covers the basic parameters of the settlement proposal and then investigates some of the possible reactions by merchants, issuers, and networks were the settlement to be approved the by judge.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan welcomes back David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, for the final episode of this year's fraud series.  Listen in as Yvette and David reflect on state of fraud as 2025 comes to a close. They discuss rising identity theft reports, the persistent challenges of measuring fraud losses, and the alarming trends associated with synthetic identities, stolen identities, and insider fraud. The conversation explores issues around various payment systems, agentic AI tools, and the regulatory gaps that contribute to escalating fraud incidents. 

Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond are back from Money 20/20 and join Yvette Bohanan on this episode to provide their insights on the prevailing themes and standout announcements.  Tune in to also hear tips for navigating the conference and overall thoughts on the evolution of Money 20/20 and other industry events.  

We've seen a big push in recent years to improve cross-border payments. And yet, cross-border payments remain problematic for consumers and businesses, particularly in emerging markets or parts of the world with volatile currencies or limited availability of correspondent banks. At the center of this challenge is a concept called liquidity. In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Ashley Lannquist welcome Mouloukou Sanoh, CEO and Co-Founder of MANSA, to explore liquidity challenges in cross-border payments, the transformative potential of stablecoins in emerging markets, and the strategic role of fintechs and banks in evolving global payment infrastructures. Listen in as they discuss practical solutions to these complex issues, aiming to unlock liquidity and scale payments efficiently across borders.

We joke that all conversations should be recorded at Glenbrook because they often lead to some interesting podcast episodes. If you have 15 mins, tune in for a fly-on-the-wall perspective in this bonus Fanning the Flames on recent developments in agent protocols.  Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan reflect on the history of the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol and how it compares to modern protocols being developed for agentic commerce by companies like Google, Stripe, and Basis Theory.  They explore why protocols and standards are important, what makes them take hold or "get off the ground like a lead balloon", and how recent announcements in this space are shaping our current view on agentic payments.   

The three major takeaways from stablecoins are that they are fast, global, and low cost. But why are they low cost? Thus began our quest to dive into the economic ecosystem of stablecoins. When creating material for our workshops or roundtable meetings, we're always thinking about how to give slides the "Glenbrook treatment" - how do we get past the headlines and down to fundamentals? In this Fanning the Flames episode, Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan take you behind the scenes to show the "making of" our new stablecoin economics slide. Listen in as they discuss the points of monetization and key revenue streams in the stablecoin value chain, and address questions around practical usage and the evolving landscape. Take a deeper look at stablecoins (and other industry trends) at our upcoming 1-day Advanced Payments workshop on December 4th in San Francisco. Space is limited - enroll today! 

In this episode of Payments on Fire, Chris Uriarte welcomes Anne Hay, Chief Marketing Officer, and Mike Kaplan, Chief Revenue Officer, from PayNearMe to discuss the evolution and optimization of the payments experience. They explore the broader concept of payments optimization and how improvements and customization in all aspects of the payments journey can lead to organizations getting paid faster and with a lower total cost of acceptance. Listen in as they highlight the challenges faced by billers in sectors like healthcare and utilities, and provide insights on the growing importance of alternative payment methods and meeting customers where they are.

In this episode, Bryan Derman welcomes two highly respected members of the investment community who represent the two sides of that business: Tim Chiodo, Managing Director and Lead Analyst for Payments, Processors and Fintech at the global investment bank UBS, and Chris Kim, a public and private market investor who leads payments and fintech activities for Capital International, one of Capital Group's three equity units. Tune in as we discuss what's happening in the market with publicly traded companies, digital wallets, the merchant acquiring space, and private equity. We'll consider what investors look for in a payments company, explore new flows, and debate the impacts of regulation, stablecoins, and M&A deals before closing out the episode with an investment perspective lightning round.

"97.0% for those whose full personal information was freely available on the darknet" experienced identity theft attempts, according to a key finding in SentiLink's recent report on the probability of loss.  In part three of our series on payments fraud trends and tactics, we welcome back David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to dive into how David and his team use a "data-driven" approach in their investigations and how they have applied their research to predict the fraudulent use of identity information.  Tune in to hear how an evidence-based approach can help your team engage in effective fraud prevention.  

In our 2024 Wrap Up episode, we looked into our crystal ball to predict how different payments  themes may evolve in the coming year; however, this industry delivers headlines at a rapid-fire pace (by the way, are you subscribed to Payments News?) and it can be hard to keep up.  To help you read the tea leaves in the mountains of publications, Yvette Bohanan rounded up Chris Uriarte and Drew Edmond for this mid-year update on payments industry trends. Tune in to hear updates and perspectives on the following topics: Regulation, including the Durbin Amendment, CCCA, and Click-to-Cancel Stablecoins Agentic Commerce Tokenization Fraud and Risk, including Visa's VAMP and passkeys

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by Chanan Lavi, CEO and Co-founder of Kipp, to discuss solutions to one of the most common card decline reasons - non-sufficient funds. Listen in as they talk about how to optimize these transactions and explore the implications for merchants, issuers, and consumers. 

How fast is fast enough?  When we look at fast payments data across countries, the US comes in pretty far behind in transactions per capita. And on the surface, this makes sense. FedNow is still new, and RTP volumes are relatively low.  Join Russ Jones and Will Eisler at the Glenbrook water cooler as they debate a looser definition of fast payments, explore challenges for adoption of traditional fast payments systems in the US, and ponder if the US actually has a more advanced and widely adopted "fast" payments ecosystem when we consider how Americans are experiencing faster money movement.

In our third episode in a series to spotlight the latest in global developments in payment systems from a financial inclusion lens, Sonja Kelly, Global Head of Women's World Banking Institute, joins Joanna Wisniecka to dive into design principles for inclusive digital financial systems and how all end users benefit when design considers the specific needs of women. Listen in as they discuss barriers to women's financial inclusion, the critical importance of addressing safety and trust issues, and potential benefits and risks associated with emerging technologies like AI and CBDCs.

In this episode, Rehman Baig, Chief Product Officer at FlexFactor joins Drew Edmond to talk about how FlexFactor is rethinking payments optimization through a Merchant of Record model. For most people in the industry, "Merchant of Record" is usually associated with global tax compliance and marketplaces, not optimization. But FlexFactor is using it to directly address failed payments and auth rate challenges in a way that merchants simply can't do on their own. This is a fascinating conversation for anyone working to solve performance issues at scale, especially if your team has ever looked at your decline rate and said, "We've tried everything. What now?"

Would you let a software agent, powered by AI, search, select, and complete a purchase on your behalf? Will a merchant be able to tell if there's a human or robot behind the transaction? What about risk and regulation concerns?  Russ Jones and Drew Edmond spent some time at the Glenbrook water cooler this week to consider the rapidly emerging topic of agentic commerce and agentic payments. Tune in as they explore different industry perspectives in order to understand the implications of this new technology in the payments ecosystem. 

In a series of episodes, Glenbrook's Joanna Wisniecka will to bring you up to speed on what's happening globally as countries modernize payment networks and reach individuals and businesses through faster payment systems. In this episode, Joanna welcomes Sabine Mensah, Deputy CEO of AfricaNenda, a leader in financial inclusion, to explore Africa's dynamic path towards inclusive instant payment systems and the need for continued innovation and collaboration to enable access to financial services for all Africans on the continent by 2030.

Here's a payments conundrum for you: We now have more ways to authenticate access to an online account or app than ever before. And yet, account takeover (ATO) - basically unauthorized access to an account - is at record levels. In this episode, Glenbrook's Yvette Bohanan and Chris Uriarte are joined by Rocky Scales, CEO of IDgo, to explore this multifaceted problem.  Tune in as they discuss the vulnerabilities in authentication techniques, the need for better consumer education, and how financial institutions and businesses can implement more secure and user-friendly authentication systems to counteract evolving threats from sophisticated fraud methods. 

In this episode, Brant Peterson, Head of Enterprise Product, North America at Worldpay, joins Drew Edmond to talk about payment optimization through the perspective of a payment service provider. Worldpay is one of the world's largest global PSPs - it processed over 2.5 Trillion Dollars in 2024, which was made up of 50 Billion transactions. Tune in to hear their perspectives on payment optimization and solutions that PSPs can offer merchant customers to help them improve their approval rates.

With this episode, we are launching a series to explore the current state of global financial inclusion efforts from a payments perspective. Joanna Wisniecka joins Yvette Bohanan to chat with Michael Wiegand, Director of Inclusive Financial Systems at the Gates Foundation, about the work the Foundation is doing globally and the transformative impact of digital financial inclusion on economies and societies.

Spec co-founder and CEO Nate Kharrl joins Yvette Bohanan on Payments on Fire to dig into some of the tactics and tech that is enabling today's fraud schemes, and how GenAI is redefining the payments risk landscape.

Glenbrook partners Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Simon Skinner jump on a special Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire to give a first take on the  Global Payments acquisition of Worldpay. Tune in to hear their strategic perspective on the deal.

David Maimon, head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, joins Yvette Bohanan for another episode to raise awareness about different fraud tactics and their impacts.  In this conversation, Yvette and David explore the intricacies and implications of Credit Profile Numbers (CPNs) and synthetic identity fraud, as well as  "zombie debt" and assumed identity fraud.  Listen in to hear the implications of these fraud schemes and how industry professionals can get ahead of them.  

"Payments Performance Optimization" is a pretty broad term, and it might mean different things to different people.  In a series of Payments on Fire episodes this year, Glenbrook's Drew Edmond will be talking to guests who are approaching payments optimization from a variety of different angles, with a focus on primarily online, card not present merchants.  At the end of the day, a merchant wants the maximum number of good transactions to be authorized successfully. It sounds so simple. But is anything in payments really simple? In this episode, Oban MacTavish, CEO and Co-founder of Spade, joins Drew to explore this issue by focusing on merchant data, and how issuers make decisions about card transactions.  

As legal and regulatory restrictions have become relaxed in recent years, we've been noting the increasing prevalence of surcharges on payment cards here in the U.S.  Perhaps it was inevitable that the practice would become more commonplace in our market, which is known around the world for relatively high rates of card interchange and a relatively light touch in financial services regulation. Surcharging is a tricky issue with a lot of different stakeholder perspectives to consider. In this episode, Emily Tsitrian, co-founder of Yeeld, joins Bryan Derman and Drew Edmond to share  industry insights on this emerging practice and how businesses can best implement surcharging while staying compliant.

In 2024, to our great delight, we had a conversation with David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink. We're fortunate to welcome David back for a quarterly series this year to check in on payments fraud writ large - to better understand what's happening and why. Listen in to this episode as Yvette and David discuss the evolution and resurgence of check fraud, the increasing sophistication of fraud rings targeting banks and the government, and the adaptation of new technologies, including Generative AI, for criminal activity.

In this episode, Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward, joins Glenbrook's Bryan Derman to share insights on the evolving partner banking space, the importance of risk and compliance frameworks, and Pathward's mission of financial inclusion. Tune in as they also discuss potential policy and regulatory changes due to implications of major discrepancies in the banking-as-a-service arrangement between fintech platform Synapse and its banking partners. 

In this episode, Debbie Bartoo and Russ Jones join Yvette Bohanan to discuss Glenbrook's focus on payments education and share some of the fun and fascinating things that have happened in facilitating workshops for 34,000 (and counting) payments geeks. Listen in to hear behind-the-scenes insights from their workshop experiences and highlights from the latest offering, On-Demand Learning, as Glenbrook continues to evolve payments education with the changing industry landscape.

Booshan Rengachari, CEO of Finzly, joins Glenbrook's Elizabeth McQuerry and Simon Skinner to discuss how software, fast payments, and open banking are reshaping the banking industry and the way we think about financial services. Tune in as they cover the challenges of modernizing legacy banking systems, the rise of fast payments, and the potential of open banking to integrate banking services into everyday life. The episode also explores fraud prevention in fast payment systems and the evolving role of banks amidst competition from fintech companies.

The Glenbrook partners reflect on key trends and challenges in the payments industry that shaped 2024 - from generative AI, open banking, the evolving regulatory landscape, and the rise of fast payment systems worldwide. And you can't get the Glenbrook team in a "room" without discussing ongoing fraud implications, orchestration in merchant payments, and the progress of tokenization. Tune in to hear insights from our industry experts on these themes and more as we wrap up the year and look towards 2025.

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.  

Payments and treasury are two sides of the same coin. Payments teams are responsible for the customer journey - payments into a company and sometimes disbursements to sellers, app developers, content creators, or vendors. Their role usually includes working with banks and other providers to ensure money moves into and out of the company's accounts correctly and efficiently.  Treasurers are responsible for managing cash, ensuring the efficient flow of funds, and ensuring that things like currency conversion are not eroding margins. Fintechs often have those goals and are usually searching for a bank sponsor who understands what they are trying to build.  Debopama Sen, Head of Payments at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, joins us for this episode to explore how treasury and payments professionals can collaborate on opportunities presented by the evolving payments landscape.   

Yvette Bohanan and Russ Jones celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the announcement of Apple Pay by reflecting on its origins, challenges, and successes. The episode highlights key features like tokenization, encryption, and biometric authentication, emphasizing Apple Pay's focus on security, privacy, and convenience. Tune in to take a look back at Apple Pay's significant impact on the payments industry and a look forward to its continued expansion.

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.

The introduction of real-time payments in the U.S. market has been unfolding for several years now, but it seemed to pick up momentum in the last year as FedNow came to market. We now have over 1,000 banks live with real-time payments (at least for receiving) and a solid majority of transaction accounts are now reachable via FedNow, The Clearing House's RTP system, or both. We wanted to understand whether we might be reaching the elusive "tipping point" for real-time payments in the U.S. and which players and what kind of use cases might be driving the growth. So, we turned to an old and respected friend of Glenbrook to share a perspective. In this episode, we go deep on the state of real-time with Dimitri Dadiomov. Dimitri is CEO at Modern Treasury, which gives him a birds-eye view of transaction trends as his company connects major corporations and leading-edge fintech platforms to a growing set of major banks in order to enable and streamline the origination of many money movement use cases.

Sometimes an episode sticks with me. It just keeps coming back in different ways. Reading an article, having a conversation, even watching TV can make me stop and reflect on a recording. This is exactly what has been happening since we sat down with Dr. David Maimon, Head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, to talk about fraud. As always, we covered a lot of ground in this episode. As you might expect, we talked fraud trends. What you might not expect is a conversation, most enlightening, on the psychology of fraud and those who perpetrate it. Many thanks to David for sharing his insights on the dark web, on this podcast and regularly on LinkedIn. If you are not following him there, you should be. Last but not least, a shout out to Georgia State University and the work they are doing in their Evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group. Good stuff.

In this Fanning the Flames episode of Payments on Fire, Glenbrook's Bryan Derman, Chris Uriarte, and Russ Jones discuss Mastercard's bold June announcement to eliminate manual card number entry for eCommerce transactions in Europe by 2030, and explore the challenges and necessary steps to achieve this goal. The conversation centers around three core components from the announcement: tokenization, streamlined guest checkouts, and authentication via passkeys. Tune in to hear more about the mechanics of these technologies, their industry adoption, and implications for merchants, issuers, and cardholders.