Fintech Layer Cake
Welcome to Fintech Layer Cake. A podcast where we slice big Financial Technology topics into bite-sized pieces for everybody to easily digest. Our goal is to make fintech a piece of cake for everyone. Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic — the fastest and most flexible way to launch a card program.
Fintech Layer Cake
Payments at Square, Etsy, and the Agentic Era, with Drew Edmond, Partner at Glenbrook Partners
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Drew Edmond has spent 15 years inside payment operations, first at Square from its scrappy hardware days through IPO, then at Etsy running payments across a marketplace with sellers in 230+ countries. Today he advises merchants at Glenbrook Partners and hosts the Payments on Fire podcast.
In this episode, Reggie Young sits down with Drew to trace how payments actually work from the operator's seat. They cover what changes when a payment goes card not present, the data and testing work most merchants skip, why global expansion demands a plan for every country rather than every region, and whether agentic commerce is real yet. Drew's answer on that last one is more measured than the hype, and more useful.
Fintech Layer Cake is powered by Lithic, financial infrastructure that helps teams build better card and payments products for consumers and businesses.
Chapters:
00:00 – Cold open: why card not present changes everything
00:35 – Meet Drew Edmond: Square, Etsy, and Glenbrook
02:53 – Inside early Square: free readers and a new class of merchant
04:40 – The chain of trust that holds payments together
07:13 – Living in constant negotiation with banks and networks
10:43 – Trusting "the Twitter guy" with your money
11:46 – Square vs. Etsy: the three jobs every platform shares
12:38 – What e-commerce and going global really change
14:51 – Why there's no such thing as a "Europe strategy"
18:53 – The optimization lever most merchants underinvest in
21:44 – How fraud quietly tanks your approval rates
25:32 – Why the optimal amount of fraud isn't zero
26:44 – The hidden complexity of subscription payments
33:13 – The "miasma of payments" and 900-page network rulebooks
35:38 – The CVV era of agentic payments
41:03 – Why discovery is harder than the payment itself
44:57 – Who controls the agent layer wins payment selection
Nothing in this podcast should be construed as legal or financial advice.
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