Leaders In Payments

Your churn dashboard might be accusing your product of something your payments stack actually did. When a renewal charge fails, customers can disappear even if they still want what you sell, and that “involuntary churn” quietly drains ARR, wrecks retention analysis, and forces teams to make the wrong fixes.

In this episode I sit down with Charles Rosenblatt, CEO of Butter, to unpack how subscription businesses can recover revenue from failed card payments using machine learning. We get specific about why many dunning programs rely on simple retry schedules, and how an ML-driven approach can choose the right moment for each invoice based on patterns in card and issuer behavior. Charles also shares how Butter works globally and plugs in as an abstraction layer on top of existing processors, so merchants can improve recovery without ripping out their current setup.

Then we look ahead: Butter is expanding from reactive recovery to predictive modeling that helps companies anticipate payment failures before they happen. Charles walks through real operational scenarios across telehealth, AI subscriptions, physical subscription boxes, and gyms, where a predictive score can guide whether to ship, whether to pause access, and how to reduce wasted CAC. We also talk about using anonymous card transaction variables without PII, and where AI is genuinely useful versus just hype in the payments industry.

If you run subscriptions, payments, billing, or growth, you’ll leave with a clearer way to separate product churn from payment friction and a roadmap for improving revenue retention. Subscribe to Leaders in Payments, share this episode with a teammate, and leave a review with your biggest churn question.

The moment AI agents can buy things for us, payments stop being a simple “click to pay” problem and become a trust problem. Greg Myers sits down with Sanjay Saraf, SVP and Global Chief Product Officer for Merchant Solutions at Fiserv, to map out what agentic commerce really means for merchants, ISVs, and the broader payments industry as software moves from assisting the shopper to acting for the shopper.

We break down the simplest definition: customers set intent and rules, then an AI agent handles discovery, decisioning, and transaction execution. That shift challenges infrastructure built on the assumption that a human is present for authentication, authorization, and confirmation. Sanjay explains why the biggest change is the trust layer and how dispute resolution, refunds, and chargebacks must evolve when an autonomous agent initiates the purchase.

We also dig into the emerging network frameworks shaping agentic payments, including Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework. One emphasizes whether the agent is authorized to act, while the other emphasizes proving customer intent with a traceable record. From there, we talk practical implementation: how providers like Fiserv aim to make this seamless for integrated merchants, why SMBs can’t be left behind, and why “agentic discovery” may become as important as traditional SEO for product catalogs.

Finally, we cover where early ROI may show up first, especially through reduced fraud, fewer disputes, and clearer authorization, along with real-world use cases in travel and high-impact B2B invoice and supplier payments. Subscribe for more conversations on the future of payments, and if this helped you, share it and leave a review so more builders can find the show.

Most payments teams obsess over money in, then act surprised when slow payouts drive churn, support tickets, and lost growth. Greg Myers sits down with Ran Grushkowsky, Co-Founder and CEO of MassPay, to unpack why “time to money” is becoming a product feature and why the companies that treat payouts as strategy will outpace the ones that treat it as plumbing.

We get into what MassPay actually does for corporate clients that need global payouts across multiple endpoints: local bank deposits, mobile wallets, cash pickup locations, push-to-card via Visa Direct, and even crypto. Ran explains the real challenge behind modern payout infrastructure: fragmentation. RTP, FedNow, wallets, and countless country-specific rails create a maze of integrations, compliance requirements, and operational risk. MassPay’s answer is a proprietary network with deep redundancy in every market plus smart routing that weighs speed, compliance fit, and total cost, not just the cheapest per-transaction quote.

Ran also shares what’s reshaping the space right now: stablecoins as a cross-border speed and hedging tool, the shift toward embedded compliance that lets platforms control their own onboarding and payout experience, and how AI is already improving payout success rates through data normalization and faster reviews. We close with leadership lessons on where the real moat is headed in fintech and why payouts can move from cost center to profit center.

Your BNPL strategy can’t be “pick one provider and hope.” When you sell across borders, buy now pay later becomes a payments infrastructure problem: different countries, different regulations, different checkout habits, and a constant pressure to keep conversion high without turning your team into an integration factory.

We sit down with Cihan Duezguen, CEO and Co-Founder of Green Banana, to unpack a focused approach to payment orchestration built specifically for BNPL. We talk through why merchants and payment service providers are asking for a single, harmonized API that can connect to multiple BNPL providers while staying invisible to the shopper. 
Cihan explains what it means to be an agnostic infrastructure layer, why Green Banana doesn’t run its own risk or credit checks, and how neutrality creates flexibility for merchants that need to change providers as requirements shift. 

From there we zoom out to the bigger payments trends Cihan is watching: stablecoins as a back-end innovation that could unlock new value for PSPs, banks, and merchants, plus the rise of agentic commerce where AI agents buy products through voice prompts and automated flows. If those changes land the way he expects, the retailers and payment leaders who prepare now will win the next generation of checkout UX.

Payments is full of noise: legacy processors, vendor sprawl, duplicate onboarding, and merchants who just want their money faster. We cut through it by showing a pragmatic path from point products to a unified embedded finance stack that actually scales. With Jaris founder and CEO Chris Aristides and VP of Platform Partnerships Matt Thomas, we unpack why “foundation first” beats bolt-on every time and how to make it work across multiprocessor portfolios without ripping out your core.

We start with the playbook behind winners like Square and Stripe: remove complexity, unify the experience, and make multi-product adoption effortless. Then we translate that into the realities of processors and ISOs. Chris explains the banking backbone - independent RTN, sponsor bank alignment, and vertically integrated ledgers—that makes settlement reliable and compliant. Matt breaks down managed settlement as the key unlock: a dynamic funding layer that normalizes Fiserv, TSYS, Worldpay, and Elavon flows, enabling split settlement, instant payouts, and automated loan repayment without custom builds for each backend.

From there we stack the products merchants actually use. Lending remains a high-margin anchor with powerful retention, while instant payouts reach a far larger share of the base with a clean pay-as-you-use model that works on weekends and holidays. High-yield savings ties it together for cash management, all delivered through one onboarding, one golden merchant record, and a white-labeled UI that honors sub-ISO relationships and trust. The result is tangible: fewer forms, faster activation, clearer visibility for ops, and a material lift in retention and revenue.

If you lead partnerships, product, or operations at a processor or ISO, this conversation gives you a concrete framework to touch the other 95 percent of your merchants, modernize onboarding, and launch new revenue lines through a single integration. Subscribe, share this episode with your team, and leave a review to tell us which product you’d launch first.