This newsletter explores how money moves, across borders and cultures, and how it's changing.

This post is a follow-up to something I wrote earlier this year titled How Geopolitics Shapes Fintech in 2026. It's worth reading the earlier post before this one if possible but not essential.

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In that post I set up the idea that fintech and geopolitics intersect far more than many people think. This is a good time to highlight how everything comes together in the context of an ongoing event. After setting the scene we get into topics such as cloud and data centre infrastructure, crypto and stablecoins, and how today’s wars are fought as much in the digital world as the physical one. As ever please let me know any feedback via LinkedIn, Twitter (X), or email.

On the 18th of June 1815 the Battle of Waterloo took place in what is now Belgium.

On one side was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, who commanded the Anglo-Allied army. On the other side was Napoleon Bonaparte — the French Emperor — and his men. The battle was won by the English and their allies. A battle which became so famous that even ABBA wrote a song about it, and it won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974. Four days after the battle Napoleon abdicated and was exiled by the British to St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, where he remained until his death some years later.

During the battle one of Wellington’s men caught sight of Napoleon within range.

“There’s Buonaparte, Sir. I think I can reach him, may I fire?”

Wellington responded:

“No, no. Generals commanding armies have something else to do than to shoot at one another.”1

The source of this event is Wellington’s biographer, and the anecdote tells us something interesting about the views of the time. Taking out an opposing general directly, in what is known today as a decapitation strike, was not considered gentlemanly. Generals sought to win on the battlefield through skill and strategy, and any potential shortcut to victory was neither sought nor desired.

History has other similar stories.

Back in the 12th century, during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was sick with fever. In a sign of mutual respect his arch enemy Saladin sent him fruit and his personal doctor to help take care of him.2 The two never met in person, although their respective forces fought across the Holy Land for two years. War has always meant death, destruction and suffering, but war had an honour code.

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Unlike the examples above, the de facto playbook of modern warfare is different. The previous unwritten rule that meant not going after the opposing general, emperor or leadership is over. On the 28th of February 2026, the US and Israel unleashed a maelstrom of destruction on Iran, and Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was bombed and killed in the opening salvo.

Anusar Farooqui, who writes as PolicyTensor on X, argued on a podcast with Jeet Heer of The Nation that there is no precedent for such action in modern Western history.3 Leader decapitation did not exist as a strategy until very recently. Yet, despite the gambit, taking out the Iranian leadership did not work.

After roughly six weeks of fighting there was a ceasefire, which expired and was replaced by a Memorandum of Understanding.4 This opened the door to potential changes in how Iran’s financial system interacted with the world:

• Releasing some of the estimated $100bn in frozen Iranian assets by removing US secondary sanctions, without which banks cannot easily send money to Iran.

• Immediate easing of oil-related sanctions allowing Iranian crude oil to enter global markets for the first time since 2018.

• Helping ease Iran back into the global financial system. Meaning the lessening of the use of local crypto exchanges as a workaround to sanctions. Especially interesting as the US Treasury sanctioned Iranian crypto exchanges Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, Ramzinex and associated personnel in early June, two weeks before the MoU was signed, which was potentially part of the negotiation.

But regardless of the promise of the MoU, in the past two weeks hostilities restarted.

Tit-for-tat accusations erupted in more sustained attacks. As I write this the US has paused its attacks on Iran after thirteen straight nights of strikes on the country. Alarmingly for the global economy, last week the oil price hit $100 a barrel for the first time since early May.

There was a fear that during the World Cup the war would start again and take away from the tournament. But it did restart somewhat under the radar, at a lower velocity than before, and it hasn’t dominated our TV screens like it once did. The consensus among analysts is that neither side wants a return to full-blown war. At the same time the status quo doesn’t suit either side. How exactly things will pan out is not clear. Although we can say that this war has been yet another rupture in the global order. The implications for how money moves are under-explored.

From Gold to Digital Dollars

I wrote in a previous post that fintech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In that post I covered topics such as financial chokepoints, how markets reacted to the US raid on Venezuela (signalling new potential opportunities for e-commerce platforms), and how stablecoins have the capacity to help state actors avoid sanctions.

A core part of the analysis centred on the fact that our fintech lens often sits at the level of technological change, funding rounds, and big personalities, but rarely covers the main societal and political shifts taking place — including war.

In previous eras money moved differently. In some cases it was a matter of stealing a nation’s gold — as the Nazis did in World War 2. Bankers rushed to send their gold reserves to the US and Canada to escape the tentacles of the Third Reich. The Bank of England successfully sent 2,000 tons of gold from the UK’s vaults to North America and helped other European countries do the same. Despite this, estimates are that Hitler’s men plundered a value equivalent of $20bn in today’s money from central banks in Europe.5

Another example of how war and gold come together can be seen from 1797-1821. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain moved away from the gold standard. There was a risk of a currency crisis as sightings of the French fleet off the coast of England led to panic as farmers sought to change their pounds into gold:

The Newcastle banks were first to run out of reserves after local farmers, on 18 February 1797, had sold their cattle cheaply and had gone, almost in one body, to their local banks to cash the notes they had received.6

War spending drained the nation’s gold reserves. Allowing pounds to convert to gold 1:1 could have bankrupted the Bank of England, something which doesn’t make sense in today’s world where central banks can print money7 for reasons of financial stability, yet back then there was cause for concern. The usual mechanism of swapping pounds for gold at will was put on hold.

Physical gold was for centuries the main medium of monetary exchange. Gold bars and gold coins were money both within and between nations. Today is different. Money can zip across borders in seconds. In wartime data centres routing digital dollars can get disrupted by drones and missiles. If power goes down then money doesn’t flow. Every impact to critical infrastructure is a blow to financial flows, and the systems that power the global economy are more brittle than they may seem.

Fintech needs the cloud

It’s no coincidence that fintech hit its stride when cloud service offerings started appearing as standard. What is the cloud? It’s another name for running software and storing data on shared infrastructure in a specialised location. Cloud providers can host many companies under one roof, eliminating the need for fintechs to have infrastructure on their own site — helpful given that startups may operate from a co-working space or even a bedroom in the early days.

These days we don’t even think about whether we need a data centre or not, we just choose which of the main providers we want to use. Usually this means AWS (Amazon), or Azure (Microsoft), or Google Cloud. In earlier times, one of the clearest differences between banks and fintechs was their infrastructure model.

Banks have traditionally operated their data centres locally, often referred to as “on prem”, meaning on the bank’s physical premises. Many banks still operate in this way. Moving to the cloud can be seen as risky. It means less absolute control and working within processes and technical specifications defined by the cloud provider. Legacy banks developed with their core systems and architecture running on site. Neobanks such as Monzo and Revolut developed as cloud-first from day one, and have multiple cloud providers in place so they can switch between providers should an outage occur.

If the strength of working in the cloud is the ability to operate with lower costs and innovate faster, the Iran war has shown that there are also vulnerabilities.

In early March Iranian drones struck AWS (Amazon Web Services) data centres in the UAE and Bahrain. Three facilities were hit in what Mahmoud Abuwasel from law firm Wasel & Wasel described as the first publicly confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider.8

Some fintech companies including Alaan, Hubpay, and ride-hailing app Careem saw lengthy outages. ADCB, one of the region’s largest banks, went offline for two full days (although it was not confirmed if this was specifically related to the drone strike). Regional backup sites didn’t work as intended.9 One of the main promises of the cloud, the promise of switching between data centres within a region to ensure uptime and stability didn’t work. If multiple sites get attacked then this premise doesn’t easily hold up.

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This brings us to a wider point. Physical infrastructure vulnerability matters more than ever. In 2025 Trump signed a number of deals with Gulf countries worth roughly two trillion dollars. Yet if the infrastructure is not safe from drone attacks then the investment is much riskier. Emphasising this point, Iran has threatened to attack one of the key projects in the region, the OpenAI Stargate data centre. There’s too much money on the table for these deals to roll back. But operational risk has increased, and companies will have to adapt accordingly.

The below image shows oil infrastructure getting physical protection to help against drone attacks. This is a new reality. In a world of AI, data centres are more important than ever and physical protection for key sites could be the norm in areas where the security situation requires it.

From a fintech lens there’s also a regulatory dimension to consider.

Some countries have specific data residency requirements — data must be hosted and stored in-country. In other cases, in-region will suffice. These rules and regulations differ country-by-country, but as a general rule it makes sense for all fintechs to understand options for switching: not just between cloud providers; but also options for switching between regions. Countries should also consider increasing optionality; some markets have fewer cloud providers than others, and regulations may restrict the operating models available to fintechs. The key question is whether you can switch region or provider in the worst-case scenarios.

Iran’s Bank Sepah provides another example of how physical infrastructure forms part of the modern battlefield. The bank is a result of the merger of five banks associated with the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). As well as acting as Iran’s premier military force, the IRGC also controls much of the economy, with some estimating that the organisation controls 25-40% of the Iranian economy through formal and informal means. Bank Sepah was responsible for paying IRGC salaries and on the 11th of March, well into the second week of the war, a missile destroyed a Bank Sepah data centre in Tehran.

Bank Sepah wasn’t operating on shared infrastructure. The data centre was only for the bank itself. It was single-tenant infrastructure like that used by many legacy banks in the West, and while there was heavy security on the ground this didn’t help — there was no expectation of a missile attack. Following the hit on Bank Sepah, American Banker reported that there was a heightened threat of cyber attacks to American banks. Banks on the other side of the world can get pulled into a conflict as it escalates from the physical to the digital domain.

Financial infrastructure within Iran remained a target even during the recent ceasefire. While the missiles stopped, banks suffered cyber attacks. Four banks were affected by outages on the 10th of June. On the 23rd of June card transactions failed, and several banks saw ATMs and Point of Sale (POS) systems go down.10 Even though the war had paused, customers still had to deal with disruptions to their finances.

Struggles on the blockchain

In How Geopolitics Shapes Fintech in 2026 I wrote:

Without US-controlled chokepoints, sanctioned states have found ways to move value and [to] garner digital dollars. Analytics firm Elliptic recently identified that Iran has acquired at least half a billion dollars of stablecoins, and this may be the tip of the iceberg — Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex allows users to store USDT.

USDT is issued by Tether, and the stablecoin issuer has worked closely with the US authorities in recent years. Although this cooperation didn’t always come easily. Tether is based in El Salvador and action usually comes only after a wallet or person has been sanctioned by OFAC (the Office of Foreign Assets Control), which is the agency of the US Treasury that enforces economic sanctions. This policy of cooperation with US authorities began only in December 2023, and the volume of illicit USDT is estimated to be far higher than any actions undertaken to stop the flow.

Tether can blacklist a wallet address, making it then impossible to move the assets to another party. Once a wallet is sanctioned the assets are, at least in theory, useless. In April and July 2026 around $475m of Iranian-linked USDT was frozen, which begs the question: if Tether has the ability to render wallets useless, why is USDT still accumulated and used by Iran and other sanctioned states?

• Everyone wants dollars. Oil and global commodities are generally priced in dollars. Even though Iran sits outside the formal US dollar system, allies and suppliers are still likely to prefer to receive payments in USD-denominated assets.

• Converting assets held within Iran from USDT to Bitcoin would stop Tether’s ability to freeze regime-linked wallets. Bitcoin is fully decentralised with no issuer, but Bitcoin is down 45.23% in the past year — making it much less attractive as a store of value.11 However the bigger plus for USDT over Bitcoin is the relative lack of volatility.

• According to the IMF, the local currency, the Iranian Rial (IRR), is experiencing an inflation rate of 68.9%. Euronews reported that “the official minimum monthly wage for the current year was set at 166.255 million rials (approximately €85)”, which is well below the actual cost of living. It’s not working-class Iranians buying USDT, but anyone with savings to protect. Iran’s leading crypto exchange, Nobitex,12 claims 11 million users, not an insignificant number in a country of 88m people.

Getting wallets frozen may be less bad than it seems. Considering the overall economy, losing some USDT wallets (assuming there are others that have not yet been located), may be acceptable given the alternatives. The Iranian crypto ecosystem was valued at $7.78bn in 2025 by Chainalysis, and we can assume it’s continued to grow in 2026 — getting $475m frozen is part of the price to pay for a regime doing everything it can to prop up its economy.

Paying the price

Another impact that the war has on fintech in the region, but also with global implications, is dealing with escalating levels of sanctions.

When onboarding customers, and performing regular reviews, companies need to ensure that they are not providing services to sanctioned individuals and entities. I saw this first hand a few years back when working for a payments company providing solutions to clients in the Middle East region. Often new names would appear on the US sanctions list matching the name of a director of an existing client. This would require contacting the client and getting additional information and reconfirming ID documentation. In every case I dealt with the end result was no issue. The client had a common name which matched another person on the sanctions list. Such situations may be frustrating for the client yet are essential in maintaining compliance.

The pace of sanctions has quickened in 2026, as the US Treasury has taken action against Iranian financial infrastructure on multiple occasions. This goes from sanctioning crypto exchanges themselves — mentioned earlier in this post — to shadow banking networks and even wider financial networks, such as the Ansari network.

As the OFAC Press Release explains:

Using numerous shell companies and bank accounts across multiple jurisdictions, Ansari has accumulated millions of dollars’ worth of holdings under the Saint Kitts and Nevis-based Smart Global Limited, a holding company established in 2011 under the former name Ziba Leisure Limited. Through Smart Global Limited, Ansari has invested the Iranian people’s money into real estate and commercial properties throughout Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond.

Traditionally sanctions screening may block jurisdictions, or particular persons, yet the clandestine nature of the Ansari network shows the challenges in finding structures which breach sanctions. Smart Global Limited sounds innocuous yet behind it lay a network spanning sectors, borders, and operating models.

It’s a constant cat-and-mouse game. We can be sure that Iranian-linked entities will continue to try to work around the constraints set by the sanctions regime. However, the onus will fall on companies to comply with primary (direct) and secondary (indirect) sanctions. Banks generally have compliance departments used to asking questions and getting to the heart of concerns related to sanctions. Fintech companies often run lighter but need to ensure that compliance is a core part of their operations.

Of course, an increase in sanctions activity means new opportunities for startups building the compliance stack. In the blockchain space, Chainalysis and Elliptic have grown in prominence. Their reports and analytics have helped inform government policy and identify many of those now sanctioned.

When fintech and geopolitics intersect it can be useful to have an actual live event — let’s call it a working case study — to see how things change and adapt especially during times of stress and tension. Right now we have two reference points. As well as the Iran War, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is another ongoing conflict that helps highlight how the financial realm fights a parallel war to the kinetic one. On the battlefield there’s been a stark example of how war leads to innovation and adaptation. A conflict which started with tanks is now fought largely with drones.

Also, there’s been a financial war against Russia. Western countries have layered rounds of sanctions against state-linked companies and we’ve seen the same ratcheting up on sanctions on Iran, highlighting that these days war is not fought on the battlefield alone. Economic warfare goes hand in hand with kinetic action. The US military action against Iran codenamed Operation Epic Fury sits alongside Operation Economic Fury, the codename for the economic tightening, which seeks to disrupt the Iranian regime’s financing and revenue streams.

Earlier mentions of the Napoleonic Wars, the Crusades and the Gold Standard took us back to times gone by, an era where generals, presidents and prime ministers only had to consider the physical world. Today governments, banks, and fintechs operate in a world where bombs and bullets are not the only concern. When wars start your financial infrastructure is also on the line: cyber attacks, hits to data centres, and money obfuscating across blockchains make how money moves during war more complex than ever. This will all keep evolving so let’s check in again soon on the latest developments!

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out with any feedback, comments, or suggestions. You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), or via email. Also please get in touch if you’re interested in working together. For instance: advisory work; fintech consulting projects; brand content partnerships; sponsoring this newsletter.

The exposure you can get from New York to Paris to Beijing is unrivalled, and football’s superstars are global celebrities. Some players are already well-known around the world. (Ronaldo has far more followers on Instagram than any President or Prime Minister.) Other players that some viewers might have never seen play before will explode onto living rooms in this World Cup with a stunning goal and go on to be the next big name player in one of Europe’s top leagues.

Getting associated with a big name player, a national team, or even better, a very successful, or better still, the winning national team, is great for any brand. This includes banks, payment companies, fintech, e-commerce firms and others.

The level of exposure is one thing but there’s a huge cultural significance too.

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Growing up in a pre-Instagram era many of us millennials heard of, and got to know Brazil through the nation’s football team that won the 1994 and 2002 World Cups (France won in 1998). I remember wearing a Brazil replica shirt to school in the summer of 1994 long before I knew about the Copacabana, bossa nova, caipirinhas, or samba . Perhaps these picks are too cliched! But my point is that, back then, football was how I got to learn about the nations of the world.

These cultural and historical angles to the World Cup are often not discussed retrospectively. But in the moment they add a vital dimension. Adding another lens, that of fintech and banking gives a useful perspective too. Events with a global and a local reach are powerful for financial services. Grow your brand on the world stage and advocate for your national champion at home too. Football is the world’s most popular game and some examples can highlight that fintech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This gets pieced together in what follows.

During the Cold War, Europe was divided in two. Berlin, modern Germany’s capital, was at the centre of the division. The Berlin Wall symbolised the struggle of the era. The three-and-a-half-metre-high, forty-three-kilometre-long wall cut the city in half. But it wasn’t only Berlin that was divided, Germany itself was split between East and West. Two separate governments, two political systems, two geopolitical alliances.

Two countries meant two national football teams, and in football the divide was stark.

In 1954, 1974, and 1990, West Germany won the World Cup. Additionally, West Germany, or to give its official name, the Federal Republic of Germany3, known in German as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, were losing finalists on three occasions — in 1966, 1982 and 1986. East Germany only qualified for one World Cup, the 1974 tournament. They dramatically beat West Germany in a group game, and actually topped the first group, but went out in the second group stage.4

In 1989 everything changed. The Berlin Wall fell. Families who had not seen loved ones, in many cases for decades, were able to meet again. Then, 11 months later in October 1990 Germany formally — legally and politically — united as one nation for the first time since 1945.

This meant that the 1990 World Cup, which took place in Italy, had a strange dimension.5 West Germany competed and won the World Cup. But despite the fact that the Berlin Wall was no more, Germany had not yet reunited. The fate of the “two Germanies” was still under discussion. Full German sovereignty only arrived when the US, France, the UK, and the USSR worked with the two German governments to agree a way forward.

In a documentary I recently watched called Italia 90: Four Weeks That Changed The World. In the documentary German football legend Jürgen Klinsmann, reflecting on the 1990 World Cup, mentions that as a player it felt as if all of Germany were supporting the West German team that year.6 On the way to the final he recalls seeing fans from both East and West uniting under one German flag7 and supporting the team together. This is a clear example of how football can transcend sport. In fact Klinsmann mentions that the success on the pitch may have helped catalyse the reunification that followed a few months later.

In 1994, for the first time since 1938, a unified Germany took part in a FIFA World Cup. The tournament was the first held in the United States. It was also the first World Cup featuring the back-pass rule, and the first World Cup in which a win in the group stage was worth 3 points.8

This year the United States is hosting the World Cup again. But this time there are three host countries: Canada and Mexico are also hosting — this is a first, until now there’s never been three host nations. In 2002 Japan and South Korea co-hosted the World Cup but otherwise it’s been a one-host effort.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has many other firsts:

• The first World Cup with 48 teams9

• The first time a country has hosted the World Cup for the third time — Mexico10

• The first time that Canada has hosted a men’s World Cup11

And four countries are playing at a World Cup for the first time: Uzbekistan; Jordan; Cape Verde; Curaçao.

Amazingly, two of the new qualifiers have less than 750,00012 citizens between them. Cape Verde has a population of around 530,000 and Curaçao has a population of only 185,000. Yet eight of the world’s ten most populous countries representing 4.1 billion people either did not qualify, or are banned from taking part.

With their population ranking in brackets: India (1), China (2), Indonesia (4), Pakistan (5), Nigeria13 (6), Bangladesh (8), and Ethiopia (10), did not qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and Russia (9) is still banned from taking part.

Of the world’s ten most populous countries, only the United States (3) and Brazil (7) are playing at the World Cup, and one of them — the USA — qualified automatically as a host nation. Brazil topped the South American qualifying group, but they underperformed again at the tournament itself. Norway beat them in the round of 16 earlier this week. Brazil were never one of the favourites,14 though they’ll be disappointed not to have not gone further.

So why do so many of the big nations struggle? The above video looks in-depth at the challenges of football in India. From a China lens The Economist recently had a podcast episode titled Why China still sucks at football? The world’s fourth most populous nation, Indonesia, has not made it to a World Cup finals tournament since independence, although the Dutch East Indies played in 1938 (as Indonesia was known in the colonial era), losing 6-0 to Hungary in the first round and then exiting the competition.15

One theory is that while big countries can deploy substantial money and resources, success in football, both at a domestic and international level, cannot be imposed top down. Countries who want to do well on the international stage need to allow the domestic game to evolve and mature over time, which in turn feeds into the international team’s performance.16 There’s no shortcut to success. For countries seeking prestige and success this realisation can be tough.17 Yet influence can be found not just on the pitch but off it as well. Let’s get to the money.

Before we continue…

Payments Culture is a newsletter about how money moves, around the world.

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The World Cup comes with an unmatched plethora of sponsorship opportunities.

Banks and fintechs can capture the eyes of the world via the beautiful game and one of this year’s debutants, Uzbekistan, where interest in the tournament is particularly high, clearly illustrates the potential for brands to make their name known both at home and abroad. UZCARD, one of the country’s local payment systems18 is the main sponsor of the Uzbek Football Association (UFA). In Uzbekistan locals usually pay via UZCARD or HUMO rather than with Visa or Mastercard.

As well as UZCARD’s sponsorship, fintech and e-commerce provider Uzum is also an official partner to the UFA. The company has been on a roll, raising a $130m investment round earlier this year, at a $2.3bn valuation, in a round that included Tencent. Uzum announced last September “[we] will support the preparation of the national team for the World Cup as well as the development of football across the country”. Supporting the national team but also investing in developing football infrastructure is clearly good for the brand.

As well as sponsorships at the UFA level there’s also activity at the level of individual players. Most notably with Uzbek national team captain Eldor Shomurodov working directly with TBC Bank Uzbekistan (TBC UZ) as a brand ambassador to promote football in the country. TBC UZ is the country's leading digital bank and has scaled to more than 22 million registered users — roughly half the country are customers.

All this takes place while the Uzbek government is pushing for greater private funding of domestic football and away from the state-funding model which has predominated the professional game so far. Something which Nikkei Asia explored in-depth last month. Additionally the BBC World Service recently featured a video segment on Uzbek football and the World Cup frenzy that’s been taking place in the country — highlighting that World Cup qualification has been a source of national pride.

Between writing the above section, and editing and publishing it, the group stage ended and it’s safe to say that Uzbekistan’s World Cup wasn’t successful on the pitch. They lost every game of the group stage. Though getting to the tournament in the first place was a success in itself and they will be looking to build on the achievement of their first qualification in future World Cup competitions. Sometimes successfully exiting the group stage takes a country a few attempts!

Meanwhile, while China did not qualify for the World Cup, Chinese brands are harnessing the World Cup as a means to build awareness outside of their home market. This shows how sponsorship can serve multiple purposes. For instance there’s the ability to build awareness of the company and its products in the short-term, build long-term brand equity (consumers keep seeing a brand at events over time and this adds credibility), and also the important but less discussed aspect of sponsorship: strengthening engagement with organisations such as FIFA. In essence, sponsoring an event like the World Cup is not a one event pitch, it’s often a multi-layered plan many years in the making where influence is garnered over time.

The Chinese influence was apparent from the tournament’s opening ceremony, during which, two Labubu characters, from the Chinese brand POP MART, made an appearance on the pitch. Millions watching round the world would keenly recognise the characters created by Hong Kong-based artist Kasing Lung, and millions more would be asking their younger relatives to explain the importance of these life sized plushies as they strolled around the pitch as part of the on-field entertainment prior to a ball even getting kicked.

Then there’s Mengniu, the official dairy sponsor. The company’s name is written in Chinese characters “蒙牛” on billboards within the stadiums, so the sponsorship will be picked up mostly by Chinese fans rather than international viewers. Yet Mengniu is part-owned by a state entity COFCO, giving the partnership an added political dimension. Mengniu’s involvement with football is clearly long-term. They’ve signed up as a sponsor for the 2030 edition of the World Cup, and also the 2027 Women’s World Cup.

In a move described as going beyond brand exposure to technology enablement19 some partnerships are going beyond the billboards. Take Hisense, whose technology is powering the screens for the assistant video referee system, and Lenovo, whose technology will “power FIFA's Intelligent Command Centre”, a real-time operational hub designed to support tournament management before, during and after matches.

I wrote in 2024 in a post titled Alipay+ and Chinese brands at Euro 2024 that despite the Chinese national team not taking part, Chinese brands were prominent at the championship.20 Ant International, part of Ant Group, whose domestic business is responsible for the AliPay superapp in China, was one of the main sponsors of the Euros. One of Ant International’s key products, AliPay+, which acts as platform to connect various mobile wallet systems, was everywhere at the tournament, and AliPay+ was also prominent in other locations such as department stores and airports in the host nation, Germany.

This year Ant International is not sponsoring the tournament itself. Instead they are an official sponsor of the Argentine national team, specifically for the Asia region (excluding the Middle East), where the vast majority of the company’s business lies. Argentina won the World Cup in 2022, and are doing well again this year. Working with one of the biggest teams in the tournament may be a smart move and allow Ant International’s brands Alipay+, Antom, Bettr and WorldFirst to gain prominence.

Visa is FIFA’s exclusive payment partner, so there wasn’t the option for Ant to sponsor at the tournament level like they did for the Euros. A key factor when understanding why Ant International decided to sponsor Argentina specifically is Messi, a player whom many consider to be the world’s greatest ever. Lionel Messi has scored eight goals in his five games at the tournament so far,21 and in many parts of the world, especially among younger generations, it’s common for fans to support a specific player as much as a team. When Argentina and Messi play the world stops and watches. Associating with a star player may be as valuable as associating with a team or even the tournament itself.

With GlobalData estimating that sponsoring the tournament could cost upwards of $60 million dollars in each four year World Cup cycle it should be no surprise that many banks and fintechs prefer to sponsor national teams instead. In some cases it may be less about cost, but a desire to focus on a brand’s home market. dLocal sponsors the Uruguayan national team — the company was founded in Montevideo back in 2016, and helps international brands sell compliantly across the world. Uruguay didn’t do so well at this year’s World Cup, exiting in the Group Stage, however dLocal are a strong example of a national payments champion landing a role as an official sponsor of their home country.

In fact, data from FXC Intelligence found that 88% of teams at the World Cup have a banking or payments related sponsor. Although, on a team’s shirt it’s much more likely to be a bank than a non-bank partner, which may reflect the fact that banks are still the ones with the biggest marketing budgets.

dLocal released a video called The Payers to coincide with the start of the World Cup. The video helps highlight both their sponsorship of the Uruguayan national team as well as the global reach of their payment capabilities. Additionally they released A Payers’ Game Guide, which they describe as a payments guide for global businesses to win the World Cup moment in emerging markets.

Four years ago Crypto.com was a full sponsor of the Qatar World Cup and crypto was prominent throughout the event. But this year the only crypto sponsor is Kraken, which is the official crypto exchange of the tournament, a level below full sponsor status. This is a crypto-as-an-industry demotion from 2022 when crypto was far more visible. You can’t pay with crypto at the tournament and the Kraken deal was announced only a few days before the tournament started.

Visa is the official payment partner of FIFA — world football’s governing body, and the organisation in charge of the World Cup tournament. At the Qatar World Cup only Visa cards could be used for payment. This time, payments within stadia are not restricted to Visa. However, the first wave of ticket sales was restricted to Visa cardholders only. Over one million tickets were sold before ticketing was opened up to non-Visa payment methods. That means if you only had a Mastercard or American Express card you would not have been able to participate in the first wave of ticket sales, which started on the 10th September 2025, under the name Visa Presale Draw.

The FIFA partnership is of utmost importance. This can be seen in the legal action that happened when FIFA switched their allegiance from Mastercard to Visa in 2006. Mastercard sued and won a trial in the Southern District of New York.22 The case rested on whether Mastercard had a contractual right of first refusal for the next World Cup cycle. They lost on appeal when the Second Circuit reversed the verdict. Since then, mirroring the general trend towards digital payments throughout the world, the Visa partnership has been a strong lever to gradually transform the World Cup into an almost cashless affair.

I say almost cashless as in some cases a fully cashless experience is not possible due to local laws and regulations. In some US states refusing cash is illegal. One way around this is to provide kiosks that convert cash into prepaid cards for in-stadium purchases. Often these are Visa cards, such as at the Boston stadium — known as Gillette Stadium outside of the tournament.

In Mexico two of the three stadiums hosting World Cup games accept cash, reflecting the fact that cash usage is much more prominent in Mexico23 than in the US or Canada. That said a beer at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca will set you back over $17.43 on average (around 300 pesos), which is roughly the same as Mexico’s daily minimum wage. Showing a big disconnect between the local economy and in-stadium pricing. While fans are happy to pay big money to attend games it does feel like an own goal to charge so much for a beer when buying a drink in a bar outside the stadium is so much cheaper.

There’s something special about the World Cup.

Before the tournament started I wasn’t at all looking forward to it. For the most part I’d stopped watching football, and hardly watched the English Premier League the past season. Over the past year I was losing interest in football. The big club teams with the most money keep winning — perhaps it was all becoming too predictable.

Yet as soon as the World Cup started I found myself watching several games a day. I found myself falling asleep watching Iran vs New Zealand, which kicked off at 1am local time. Not a game I’d find myself watching outside of the World Cup.

The many sub-plots of the World Cup can make it compelling to follow even if you are not a big football fan. The big name players Haaland, Mbappé, Kane, and Yamal are scoring goals, although not quite as many as Messi. Minnows such as Cape Verde massively outperformed. The Dutch King celebrated with the Curacao team in their changing room after they won their first ever World Cup point, before flying to watch the Netherlands play on the same day in a different city. Every game has a story and each player represents the pride of the nation.

Now with the quarter finals about to begin, every single game looks exciting.

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I finalised the original version of this post on a flight from London to Tokyo recently. However, I left my Macbook charger on the flight. Thankfully customer service in Japan is almost always excellent. Before I left Japan I got the charger delivered to my hotel! In what other country would that happen? Speaking from experience, not in the UK. Due to the charger mishap this post got delayed by more than a week but in turn it got longer and a bit meatier. I hope you enjoyed reading it and I hope you enjoy the rest of the World Cup!

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out with any feedback, comments, or suggestions. You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), via email. Also please get in touch if you’re interested in working together. For instance: advisory work; fintech consulting projects; brand content partnerships; sponsoring this newsletter.

London Fintech Drinks

Lastly, next week I am co-hosting London Fintech Drinks. This is an informal meet up to chat all things fintech and payments. I’ll be joined by other Substack writers from Business of Payments, Payments:Unpacked, Fintech: Under the Hood, and Angles on Fintech. If you’re in London, it’d be great to see you there.

It’s worth making clear at the outset that this isn’t an anti-agentic payments post. There’s enough substance in recent developments to say that payments and AI are clearly coming together, yet it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the gap between hype and demand. Over the past year an assumed inevitability has built up around agentic commerce, which the data doesn’t quite support. In the short term, the version of agentic commerce that will succeed is likely to augment, rather than recreate, the shopping experience. I explore this and more in the below essay.

Any comments or feedback are welcome. Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post, or you can reach me directly via LinkedIn, Twitter (X), or email.

Last month Google held their annual developer event Google I/O 2026. Similarly to Apple’s WWDC event, Google I/O has in many ways gone beyond a developer conference and now serves as a general forum to announce product updates. The extent of the new developments were such that Google published a blog titled 100 things we announced at I/O 2026.

It’s hard to keep track of everything that got announced at the event. Especially as Google has such a variety of product names, whereas other companies like Anthropic put everything within the Claude brand. Reflecting this, Ben Thompson wrote in Stratechery:

There is a lot of AI spaghetti getting thrown against the wall in terms of products; we’ll see how much of it sticks.

Thompson's critique is something which is, ironically, also a strength.

He theorises that Google’s lack of focus is precisely why it endures. This is true. When using the internet it’s hard to avoid using Google’s ecosystem in some way shape or form. Google’s surface area stretches from docs to gmail to search to YouTube to Chrome and beyond. With Google permeating AI across its solutions, users often aren't choosing to use Google's AI tools — they are persistent and integrated as part of the user experience as standard.

From a payments perspective there were a few points of note, all under the heading of Universal Cart.

28. We’re introducing Universal Cart: a truly intelligent shopping cart and your new hub for shopping on Google. You’ll be able to add things to your cart while you’re browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or even reading your Gmail. The moment you add a product, your cart goes to work for you in the background. It finds deals and price drops, gives you insights on price history and alerts you when something comes back in stock. The Universal Cart runs on our Gemini models, so your cart gets smarter as the models improve.

29. It also uses intelligent reasoning to anticipate your needs and help solve problems before they arise. It’ll proactively flag any product incompatibilities and suggest alternatives. And since the cart was built on Google Wallet, it understands your payment method perks, loyalty information and merchant offers so it can intelligently help you choose between payment methods.

30. Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) makes checkout from your cart super smooth. For many of your favorite brands, you can check out right on Google in just a few taps with Google Pay, or transfer items straight to the retailer’s site and buy there.

I mentioned in an earlier post that agentic commerce is beset by a protocol soup. UCP is one clear example of an emerging protocol in the agentic payments realm. Others such as A2A and AP2 have also emerged in the past year and competition at the protocol level can be confusing.

Yet, Google’s reach gives it a unique position. It seems likely that many of us will encounter Universal Cart and UCP in the coming months and years (dependent on if and when it launches in your market, as much of this is US only for now). Agentic commerce is leading to a change in how companies interact in terms of the end-to-end product discovery and transaction flow. In some cases, companies will compete differently to today, and there will be a battle for who owns various elements of the payment stack. This specific topic of the agentic commerce layer cake and payments stack is worth further investigation in more depth in a future post.

For the rest of today’s post, the key aspect I want to explore, is that despite all the announcements and hype, there’s often limited discussion in terms of whether consumers actually want agentic commerce.

What is agentic commerce? (and other hype cycles)

If you work in fintech you may hear the term agentic commerce every week, or maybe even every day. But it hasn’t always been like this. It’s a term whose origins are relatively recent. ChatGPT launched in December 2022, and while fintech has worked with facets of AI — such as machine learning in areas including fraud prevention — for many years, the growing popularity of LLMs has led to new possibilities for agents to lead users from product discovery-to-purchase.

One of the first mentions of agentic commerce was in November 2024 in a blog by Scott Friend of Bain Capital Ventures titled The Dawn of the Agentic Commerce Era. In the post the author explores how intelligent shopping agents could shape the world.

An intelligent shopping agent will know everything there is to know about our individual and family needs, our tastes, our existing “inventory” and, importantly, our budget. Armed with this data, our agent will not just suggest alternatives but will, in fact, complete the entire shopping mission on our behalf.1

This new paradigm will unlock huge amounts of time and savings for consumers. But, will it be equally beneficial for merchants?

Reading this reminded me of earlier technology hype cycles. Do you remember the Internet of Things (IoT)? Even though we rarely hear the term these days, it’s still around and by some measures generating significant revenue. Statista Market Insights forecasts that IoT revenue in the US alone to be worth more than $400bn in 2026.

IoT revenue is mainly in industrial sectors, and emerging technology areas such as self-driving cars. The consumer segment hasn’t proven as popular as once expected.

Back in the 2010s there was a lot of fuss about IoT. It was touted as the next big thing. In the future, our fridges would automatically order our products for us when we run low (I actually saw a presentation on this very topic given by someone from a large credit card company). Considering they make everything from fridges to phones to vacuum cleaners, companies like Samsung were seemingly well placed to capitalise on the IoT trend. Funnily enough I did end up getting a robot vacuum cleaner which connects to the internet. It’s Chinese and not Korean. Although my fridge is still an analogue one. But I do have a Samsung TV.

IoT was a strange hype cycle. Gradually we did connect more of our devices. Largely due to the expectation, which developed in the past decade that everything should be managed directly from our phones, an expectation which wasn’t prevalent at the dawn of the IoT hype. So rather than ordering new products directly from our appliances, IoT instead primarily became a way for us to manage devices from our central personal hub — our smartphones. Additionally, early IoT hype was held back by a lack of horizontal integrations. In order for a fridge to be able to order milk it would need to connect to a supermarket delivery service and in most markets such integrations were lacking. Whether it be Samsung or someone else, no IoT provider owned hardware, software and product distribution.

Will agentic commerce follow the same path as IoT? At least on the consumer level, which is the focus of this post, then it’s likely that the hype will be ahead of the demand for some time. The scale and speed of consumer adoption is always hard to predict. We may all start paying with, and through, AI-based interfaces if it becomes unavoidable — especially if every major tech and payments company offers it as standard. But history teaches us that what seems inevitable doesn’t always turn out that way.

Two other examples come to mind.

Remember when Visa paid around $150,000 (the price of 49.5 ETH at the time) for CryptoPunk #7610? NFTs crashed and burned rather quickly. They did not have “an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce” as Visa once predicted. And who can forget the Metaverse? Citibank estimated that the metaverse economy had a potential addressable market of $8-13 trillion with the prospect of reaching 5 billion users by 2030.2 Nowadays the term is rarely mentioned, or only mentioned in retrospective.

Looking back it seems obvious why these trends didn’t take off. Yet at their height, the hot money was flowing in to these developments and big corporations were spending big not to miss out on the next big thing. AI as a general trend does seem more robust. It’s already embedded into large chunks of the economy. But it’s useful to consider that what once seemed obvious and inevitable doesn’t always come to fruition. For agentic commerce, I estimate it will be something which consumers gradually get used to, and will take time, more time than many expect.

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Note: An Edgar, Dunn & Company report from earlier this year mentions that they expect agentic commerce to reach 15-25% of e-commerce volume by 2030. Interestingly, in what’s potentially a sign that researchers have learned lessons from the overly optimistic projections of the Metaverse et al the report explicitly mentions that their projection avoids “any inflated” total addressable market.

Chasing the hype but what’s the reality?

Like most tech forward industries, the fintech world is great at concocting terminology. But soon the latest terminology can only be explained with reference to other terminology, yet often no one really knows what it all means. You can get to a stage where asking too many questions seems awkward and asking ChatGPT doesn’t help. (Unless carefully questioned LLMs can regurgitate terminology inside only a shadow cloak of understanding.) It’s easy to say that the latest tech will change the world but being able to say precisely how and why is much harder.

Enter agentic commerce. The description from Scott Friend of Bain Capital Ventures noted above should have been enough. It clearly explained what agentic commerce is. Agents will know everything about our needs, tastes, inventory and budget. They’ll complete our shopping for us. The key to agentic commerce, as originally defined, is the end-to-end flow from knowledge about shopping habits to the transacting and shopping itself.

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What’s happened in the past year is that in an effort to ride the AI wave, many companies have positioned their offerings as agentic commerce, even when they were, by the original definition of the term, not agentic commerce. This dynamic is common. When a phase becomes fashionable, vendors race to attach themselves to it for marketing reasons, and what was once a useful concept turns into a label that means everything and nothing. Everything which brings together AI and payments in some way now gets referred to as agentic commerce.

What’s often missed is that the success of agentic commerce as envisaged by Scott Friend and others requires consumer buy in. No matter how good the tech may be, if consumers are not sold on agents completing their shopping for them then it won’t happen. The gap between what users want today and where the industry wants to take them is substantial.

Stripe’s 2025 annual letter, published in February 2026, provides a useful break down of what they refer to as levels of agentic commerce. Essentially degrees of autonomy in dealing with AI agents. At each level the extent of human input diminishes.

Level 1: Eliminating web forms

You research and decide what to buy. But filling out web forms is no one’s favorite way to spend a few minutes. It would be handy if you could simply send the URL to your agent and have it fill out your payment and shipping details, coming back to you with the confirmation.

The system isn’t making any decisions; it’s just typing and clicking “buy” on your behalf.

Level 2: Descriptive search

You stop searching for products or specific attributes and start describing situations.

I need back-to-school supplies for a third grader in Chicago, including clothes (nothing too itchy or tight!), pencils, notebooks, and a lunch box. My son likes K-Pop Demon Hunters and tennis. School starts in late August.

The system reasons across weather, materials, sizes, durability, taste, reviews, and delivery timelines. Specialized and long-tail products become easier to find. Annoyingly blunt keyword search is no longer a thing.

Level 3: Persistence

You stop reintroducing yourself.

Find me options for back-to-school clothes for Bobby.

The system already knows your preferences and remembers any requirements, inferred from your previous conversations and purchases. You’re still deciding what to buy, but you are choosing from a set of options that already reflects your taste and budget.

Level 4: Delegation

You stop choosing altogether.

Get the back-to-school shopping done. Keep it under $400.

The system handles the search, the evaluation process, and the purchases on your behalf. You trust it will weigh trade-offs as you would and choose things your son will like. All you do is determine the budget. (This is what most people mean today when they talk about agentic commerce.)

Level 5: Anticipation

There is no prompt.

The system already knows the school calendar, your son’s preferences, and your typical budget. All you do is receive a notification: here’s the back-to-school list of everything that’s been purchased. This is the most futuristic vision, where the things you need show up right before you need them, without you having to ask.

Agentic commerce as originally defined would be at levels 4/5 of Stripe’s categorisation. In the same letter Stripe states that we are currently “hovering on the edges” of levels 1 and 2. But are we even at levels 1 and 2 in terms of broad consumer demand?

In April of this year, McKinsey surveyed over 3,000 consumers in the US, and the output can be seen in the report Shopping in the age of AI: Redefining stores for a new era. It found that AI demand is most common in the early stages of the shopping journey, and that “by 2030, the US B2C retail market alone could see up to $1 trillion in revenue from agentic commerce”. In reality, this revenue figure will depend on how revenue from agentic commerce is defined. An earlier McKinsey report referred to “orchestrated revenue” from agentic commerce having a potential market of up to $1 trillion, which allows a lot of room for manoeuvre.

Other data shows a mixed picture.

Research by Clutch found that while 65% of consumers have used AI to research products before making a purchase, only 4% of those surveyed would be happy to let AI complete a purchase on their behalf. Data by Bain shows that “30% to 45% of US consumers currently use Generative AI for product research and comparison”, yet at the same time 50% of customers are not comfortable allowing AI to make purchases on their behalf. As the full survey data was not published it’s hard to draw conclusions either way on whether only 50% were comfortable or if there’s further nuance here.

Preferences reveal themselves more in actions than in words. If consumer surveys are unclear on whether consumers are ready to embrace agentic commerce, can real-world case studies help us better understand the demand?

The October frenzy

Possibly the most important announcement of the past year took place at the end of September 2025. Stripe and OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. With this announcement I naively thought that’s it. For a brief moment it seemed as if agentic payments was solved. I was wrong and so were many others.

Further announcements took place in September and October including ones from Mastercard and PayPal, but the Instant Checkout one really stood out. This would be the first time that users could actually pay within ChatGPT directly. Companies such as Walmart signed up to Instant Checkout. Target soon followed.3 ChatGPT was by far the most popular AI app, with around 700m users at the time, which has risen to 900m today. This solution brought together some of the world’s largest retailers with the best-known AI app. Momentous.

The growth in interest in agentic commerce following the Instant Checkout announcement led to a rise in attention-side demand — when consumers became aware of agentic commerce. The news made waves throughout the media and was picked up both within the payments industry and by general news outlets. Momentum has continued way past the search trend peak. The adoption is another story.

Instant Checkout in ChatGPT made sense on paper. If users are using AI for discovery then it logically follows that checking out in app without redirection would be the most frictionless way to pay. In fact, payments have, for a long time worked on the basis that the less friction the better. Online payment methods have lived, or died, by minimising the number of clicks or taps at the checkout. Everything was in place for Instant Checkout to be a success.

A long-read in Modern Retail explained further how both buyers and sellers would benefit:

The feature allowed users to ask ChatGPT what they’re looking for and receive recommendations of relevant products from across the web. For merchants with Instant Checkout enabled, buyers would confirm shipping details and pay the merchants directly from the ChatGPT app. The retailers would handle fulfillment, returns and customer support themselves.

Despite the promise things didn’t work out. Walmart found, when given the choice of completing a purchase via ChatGPT or a redirection to their homepage to complete the purchase, users preferred the latter option by a factor of three.

Why didn’t Instant Checkout in ChatGPT win? Partly, as discussed earlier, but proven to be even more the case here, LLMs are great for research and discovery, but users prefer to go to an existing trusted source to complete a purchase. Consumer habits are hard to change.

OpenAI staff realized that ChatGPT users were researching products to buy but weren’t using it to help them make purchases.

Other issues soon became apparent.

Many retailers sat back and watched how Instant Checkout would evolve, not quite ready to give away the checkout experience to OpenAI. But there were also product level issues as within Instant Checkout users could only purchase one item at a time. There wasn’t the concept of a shopping basket, and for large retailers pulling in live SKU data for hundreds of items was a technical challenge, which didn’t warrant engineering resource until the demand was proven. The goal was to prove the demand at the consumer level and then the additional supply, meaning more merchants, would soon follow and sign up to Instant Checkout. This goal wasn’t realised.

After six months of live data, merchants and OpenAI were able to assess the situation this spring. The company announced changes to Instant Checkout in March, noting with some contrition that:

Our North star is providing the best experience for both consumers and merchants. The best consumer experiences are powered by deep partnership with merchants. To build these deep partnerships, we want to offer merchants options for how they convert consumers. We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery.4

Yet in early 2026 the AI coding wars were big news. Anthropic’s Claude Code was everywhere, and in Q2 OpenAI’s Codex product has gained ground. Some “consumer focused initiatives have been sidelined” — including Instant Checkout, which still exists but is much less of a focus. The company sees enterprise revenue as more dependable. Many consumers use ChatGPT without a paid subscription. The balance and attention has shifted from chat to agent-led applications.

Making agentic commerce work?

While the focus of this essay has been on agentic commerce from a consumer lens, much of the recent activity and announcements have shifted towards agent-to-agent payments. Stripe and Tempo launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), and even in the past few days Mastercard announced Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), which offers "a new class of payments" specifically for AI agents. So far the noise around machine-to-machine payments has been considerable, but there's little public indication of actual transaction volumes.

The one payments protocol for machine payments that does have public volumes available is x402, a protocol that was started by Coinbase that runs primarily on the Base blockchain. Data available on Artemis, an analytics firm, shows that x402 transactions grew rapidly in October 2025 and peaked in November before declining and tailing off in 2026.

Back to the consumer side, despite the challenges of OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, this isn’t to say that agentic checkout will never work. It can be useful in specific verticals, although booking a flight may not be one of them — despite being a use case that strangely keeps coming up. Booking flights is too high-value to delegate entirely to AI and the risk and cost of getting it wrong is too high (for me at least). Other areas still make sense, and it’s in the interest of some of the world’s biggest public and private companies to make it work.

In a future post: how to make agentic commerce work for consumers, with examples from Google, what’s worked in China, and my own thoughts on what’s needed to embed and augment existing shopping experiences.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world, and why it matters.

Money20/20 in Amsterdam is coming up in less than two weeks’ time. If you’re heading to the show and would like to meet up to talk payments and fintech feel to send me a message.

You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), via email, and with the below button.

One sunny afternoon this February in Auckland I strolled around the New Zealand Maritime Museum. Given its remoteness, New Zealand has an interesting seafaring history. The travel time getting to New Zealand illustrates this remoteness: it takes at least 24 hours of flying time from the UK, and at least one flight transfer; even the shortest flight from New Zealand to Australia, countries which are considered geographically close, is more than 3 hours. Landing in New Zealand really does feel like walking on the edge of the world. I had flown to Auckland from London via Qatar, which meant the second flight was 16 hours long.

I was still suffering from jet lag sauntering around the museum. With one too many delicious Kiwi coffees in my system (New Zealand and Australia argue over which country invented the flat white), I learned something interesting. New Zealand’s coastline was fully mapped only in 1855. Or should I say mapped in the Western sense with contemporary cartographic techniques.

The indigenous people of New Zealand, the Māori, generally passed information down through the generations via storytelling rather than writing. Maps such as the one that Māori Chief Tukitahua of Ōruru drew in 1793 are rare. This was drawn in extraordinary circumstances. The Chief had been taken from his home by the British, and he drew the map in chalk to show the location he wanted to be returned to. He was brought home by Lieutenant-Governor Philip King, a full nine months after he initially left.

Inland exploration of New Zealand was hastened during the 1850s and 1860s as the country underwent a gold rush. Immigrants arrived from Europe, and even from China, to earn their crust digging for nuggets. The population of the Otago region went from 12,000 to 100,000 in a matter of years. On this trip I realised that from a Western perspective New Zealand really is a very new country.

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As a Brit, New Zealand feels like a place that can feel both slightly old fashioned yet at the same time very forward looking (compared to the UK). It’s not uncommon to find British quiz shows and soap operas on TV. In Auckland many homes can be opened with a 4-digit code entered on keypad, rather than a key, with the front door opening directly onto a busy street. Not something that would happen in London.

Other things I really like about New Zealand:

• Taking the ferry from the Auckland suburbs to the central business district makes for a great commute. No ticket needed as I paid by tapping my contactless card.

• New Zealand has really delicious food. Much of it is genuinely local and there’s great variety in cuisine. I had everything from delicious Japanese food to hearty pies — which are lighter and healthier than the UK equivalents.

• Did I mention the coffee? Wellington in particular is known as a coffee hub with independent coffee places everywhere. The fact that every sip tastes so good adds to the quality of life.

• Queenstown, in New Zealand’s South Island, is a unique place. It’s like a holiday resort, a mini theme park, and a picturesque alpine town all in one. In one day I rode a speed boat down a canyon, took a gondola up a mountain, and rode a luge down the mountain, before having a wine and steak dinner. Only in Queenstown.

As this Substack has to touch on payments sooner or later let’s move on to one of the slight negatives as a tourist in New Zealand. Even though this wasn’t my first trip to New Zealand, I’d forgotten about this aspect, and it surprised me.

You will be surcharged

The lunchtime before visiting the Maritime Museum I ate a delicious fish and chips in Auckland fish market — a short walk from the Museum. This was when I first noticed something that was going to be apparent throughout my two-and-a-half weeks in New Zealand. Surcharges for card payments — everywhere.

In the UK and EU surcharging consumer credit and debit cards is forbidden. You can still surcharge commercial or business cards, but in reality, most businesses — with some airlines the notable exception — avoid making this distinction.

In New Zealand, you can pay with card everywhere, but almost every time I did pay with card I got hit with a surcharge of anywhere between 1.5% and 2.2% (with one outlier at 5%). New Zealand’s Payments Culture is unique and it highlights how the global and local come together.

Part of the reason for the surcharge stickers I saw across the country is historical. In the 1980s, as card payments started to take off, New Zealand’s financial institutions worked together to develop the EFTPOS payment system.

Some nuances of EFTPOS are as follows:

• Users can choose between debiting their checking account or their savings account when using their EFTPOS card.

• For merchants, accepting EFTPOS is almost free. There’s no percentage-based merchant service charge. The costs are limited to terminal rental and a small per-transaction fee.

Merchants got used to EFTPOS, and over the decades, the term became synonymous with card payments in general. Visa and Mastercard were available in New Zealand even before EFTPOS hit the market but the domestic system became the payment option of choice. The international schemes were used mainly for larger purchases or when travelling abroad. Due to the cost differential many small merchants refused to take Visa and Mastercard, and only accepted EFTPOS.

In the 2000s Visa and Mastercard developed debit card products to compete with EFTPOS. But the cost differential remained. Still today, many banks issue debit cards on the domestic as well as international scheme rails. If consumers wish to avoid surcharges they can use their EFTPOS card, but as a tourist this option does not exist.

Even for local consumers there’s been a downside to EFTPOS dominance — the domestic rail doesn’t offer Apple Pay. The surcharging norm on Visa and Mastercard has made Apple Pay and Google Pay more expensive for consumers to pay with. This inverts what we see in many other developed markets. In London tapping with Apple Pay is done without a second thought and mobile wallets are a growing consumer preference. But every time you tap to buy your coffee in Wellington you’ll likely pay 1.5%-2.2% more than if you’d used cash or your EFTPOS card.

The main fee component in card payments is usually the interchange fee. This is regulated at 0.20% for debit cards and 0.30% for credit cards in the UK and EU, but in other markets like the US, interchange fees of more than 2.5% are possible. Such fees are paid directly by merchants, by businesses who accept card payments, and in part make their way back to cardholders in the form of cashback or rewards of some kind.

The New Zealand government has regulated interchange, and recently tried to ban surcharging altogether:

• From 1st December 2025 the interchange cap on in-person transactions went from 0.8% to 0.3% for domestic cards.

• On the 1st May 2026 an interchange cap on foreign card transactions was introduced for the first time, capping fees at 0.7% for credit and 0.6% for debit.

• Along with these interchange caps and cap reductions came a move to ban surcharging entirely. This failed in parliament earlier this year and looks unlikely to return to the table any time soon.

Although interchange fees are now lower, it doesn’t mean smaller merchants will see their bills reduce accordingly — in some cases, card processors may gain additional margin in the short term instead of passing it on to their customers.

The Commerce Commission, New Zealand’s competition and consumer regulator, estimates that there’s NZ$45m to NZ$60m in excessive surcharging each year over and above the actual cost of accepting payments. At least for now that’s getting pushed to consumers rather than absorbed by merchants.

Note: For a European comparator to EFTPOS something like Germany’s Girocard would make for a strong reference point in terms of consumer adoption and functionality.

Going beyond cards

Some tourists have to eat surcharges when spending in New Zealand. Other tourists literally get paid to shop. The biggest beneficiaries are Chinese visitors and residents.

The data helps tell the story.

In February 2026, coinciding with the Lunar New Year, more than 60,000 Chinese tourists visited New Zealand (this counts only mainland China passport holders and excludes passport holders from Hong Kong). The only country that had a higher number of visitors in February was Australia, which should be no surprise given the two countries have reciprocal arrangements to freely visit, live and work in each other’s countries. As well as the tourist visitors, over 30,000 Chinese citizens currently study in New Zealand, and there are around 150,000 Chinese-born residents in New Zealand, who either hold New Zealand passports or have permanent residency in the country.

In February 2026, depending on how you measure, between 4% and 5% of everyone in New Zealand was either a short-term visitor from China or a mainland-China-born resident. This represents a huge opportunity for retailers to tap into, but in order to do so they need to offer payment methods that Chinese shoppers are used to.

But it’s about more than just visitor numbers.

Chinese visitors spend an average of NZ$368 per day, which is second only to US visitors who spend $372 per day. Across an entire trip the average spend by Chinese visitors is $5,800. Meanwhile Chinese students in New Zealand spend an average of NZ$58,576 per student, much more than the international student average of NZ$45,776.

Accepting Alipay or WeChat Pay may be more costly than cards but given the spending capacity on offer it’s worth it. If merchants don’t offer these key Chinese payment methods then travellers and the diaspora may go elsewhere.

Aotearoa is what the Māori people call New Zealand, which is often translated as the land of the long white cloud. Although the name is poetic rather than meteorological, I was fortunate to be in New Zealand at the tail-end of summer and rarely saw a cloud in the sky. I’d learned that New Zealand is a fascinating example of the global and the local coming together. It’s a country of around 5m people, sparsely populated in parts, but holding a magnetic pull for visitors and newcomers from all over the world.

While locals still keep their EFTPOS card handy, I saw more signs offering JCB as a payment option than I do in London — that’s for Japanese travellers. Also far more signs offering customers the option to pay with Alipay or WeChat Pay in Kiwiland than I did when travelling in Taiwan (I’ll write more about Taiwan in a future post).

As I sipped my flat white in Auckland airport waiting to leave New Zealand I couldn’t help but think that as a Western tourist, understanding that you will get surcharged when you tap to pay is not a big deal. When life is this good it’s quickly forgotten. New Zealand may have an unusual Payments Culture but it’s one worth experiencing.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

I recently spoke with Margaret Ryan, SVP and Head of Product at Amex Digital Labs to learn more about American Express’ recent product announcement on the topic of agentic commerce. Our conversation started with the big picture:

We see agentic commerce as the next era of digital commerce. Things are changing. There’s a fundamental shift happening in how customers are searching for things, how they’re discovering products, and booking travel. And ultimately how that payment is happening. We want to make sure that we are, where our customers are.

What follows are my reflections on the conversation, a look at how Amex is approaching agentic commerce, and why their approach differs.

If you work in payments you’ll be used to reading about agentic commerce. It’s impossible to avoid. This year has seen a slew of announcements on the topic. Often, it’s hard to understand which announcements are actually relevant, and which are companies shipping news to stay in line with the competition. It’s corporate FOMO.

Everyone wants to be at the front of the pack, but it’s confusing. Those who don’t get front and centre in the agentic commerce discussion risk getting left behind.

Agentic commerce payment volumes are low, but we are caught in a frenzy of agentic commerce protocol soup.

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How many fintech professionals really know their MCP, from their UCP, and their AP2? Making it more complicated is the fact that A2A is now a double synonym. For a long-time A2A was account-to-account payments, yet now A2A is also Agent2Agent, another protocol, one which allows AI agents to exchange information with each other. Visa and Mastercard have launched their own protocols too. Visa’s TAP helps merchants verify and transact with agents, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay does a similar job on their network. Coinbase started x402 as an open payments protocol, but today, it sits within the Linux Foundation with a vendor-neutral governance structure.

From x402’s homepage:

Payments on the internet are fundamentally flawed. Filling out a form is a human behavior that doesn't match the programmatic nature of the internet. It's time for an open, internet-native form of payments. Payments that are amazing for humans and AI agents.

x402 is one of the protocols that people are most excited about. Yet as of early May its annualised run rate is around $300m, an amount which flows through Visa’s network in less than ten minutes.1

Every new protocol, or evolution of a protocol, promises to be a game changer. But for merchants, platforms, banks, fintechs, and others, the challenge is moving from a world in which payment protocols have remained the same for decades — I’m thinking of ISO 8583 — to one in which new protocols are appearing every month. Of course, it’s not all payments specific. The term-commerce often does a lot of lifting as verification and trust are key parts of agentic commerce.

With all this in mind, American Express’ recent agentic commerce announcement allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief. They were not launching a new protocol.

Understanding Amex’s offering

Recently American Express (Amex) launched the Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE)™ Developer Kit and what they cite as an industry-first protection for Registered Agent Purchases.

From the news release:

The Amex Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE)™ Developer Kit is a framework that provides technical specifications to bring American Express-issued Cards and Membership value into AI-powered interactions with trust and control. Designed for flexibility and interoperability with existing and emerging protocols, the ACE Developer Kit will enable intent-driven transactions with end-to-end visibility across the commerce lifecycle through Amex’s closed-loop network.

I’ve highlighted the sentence where Amex makes it explicitly clear that Amex is working with existing protocols, which is a change in approach compared to many payments companies of Amex’s size.2 Margaret told me that “ACE is built to be interoperable with all of the existing as well as emerging protocols”, adding that “standardization is important because that's the only way to really get this to scale.”

Interoperability is a path many payments companies are taking. For example, Amex endorses the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) alongside companies such as Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Adyen and Shopify. However, unlike Visa and Mastercard, Amex has not launched their own protocol. Partly, this is reflective of differences in business model. Visa and Mastercard sit as a coordination layer between issuers, acquirers, and other third parties, whereas Amex’s closed-loop model means their approach differs as they have direct relationships with both merchants and cardholders.

The move from single payments to payment intents is one of the biggest changes to have happened in payments in the past few decades. Wherever they sit in the value chain, payments companies need to deal with this change and understand how they can best support this paradigm shift. However, the change will be gradual and at first incremental. It may take some years before even 10% of payment transaction volumes are intent driven, yet Amex is looking to get ahead and support their merchants and cardholders as interest in the technology grows.

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It’s worth outlining some of the key differences in how the single transaction and intent models impact the user payment journey.

Single transactions:

• Each transaction requires authorisation at the time of purchase. The authorisation confirms that funds are available, and that the cardholder consents to the transaction. Various parties check for potential fraud triggers.

• The cardholder uses face ID to pay with Apple Pay, enters a code for a one click check out, or taps their card for contactless payment.

• If something goes wrong — such as the merchant charging for an incorrect amount, or the cardholder not receiving the goods they paid for — then the cardholder can initiate a dispute3 for that specific transaction.

Payment intents:

• A user defines the product they’re looking to buy alongside constraints such as price ceiling, merchant type, and the time frame for which the intent should be valid. That's the first stage of authorisation. The second stage happens against those constraints, without the cardholder needing to get pulled back into the authorisation flow.

• The cardholder is involved at the outset but not for every transaction. It’s possible to revoke, or in some cases even adjust intents that have already been established.

• If something goes wrong then the intent has to be considered. Did the agent act within the cardholder’s parameters? Existing dispute rights remain but agentic commerce introduces the new concept of one intent leading to potentially many transactions.

Agents and the dispute challenge

The dispute challenge in agentic commerce is an interesting one.

In theory agents should follow customer intents as described, yet as with any system, especially emerging autonomous systems, there’s always the possibility for error. Amex’s news release captures how they are looking to assuage the concerns customers may have when paying via an AI agent:

In the future, if a Card Member authorizes an AI agent to make a purchase and that agent sends American Express the customer’s authenticated purchase intent, American Express will protect eligible customers from charges related to AI agent error.

A couple of points to note here. The purchase protection is dependent on the agent sending Amex the authenticated purchase intent, which as per the earlier diagram, is authenticated via a passkey. Amex, as both a card issuer and an acquirer,4 has direct sight on both sides of a transaction, and while standard disputes can still be initiated, the added Amex Agent Purchase Protection provides a greater level of mitigation.

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This scenario of an agent purchasing a product incorrectly was described by Margaret as follows:

The customer may ask their agent to buy a blue shirt, but the agent goes and buys a non-refundable black shirt. The merchant has done nothing wrong. They fulfilled based on the request they received. The customer has done nothing wrong, either. But the customer is now stuck with this shirt that they can’t return… With the Amex Agent Purchase Protection, we are backing our customers.

Essentially this is Amex saying to consumers: you may be concerned about setting up an intent, but if something were to go wrong we’ve got you covered.

On the merchant side, cart context — outlined in red on the above diagram — plays an important role in making agentic payments work for all parties involved. Amex is able to compare the agent’s shopping cart with the cardholder intent. The comparison can happen at the moment of authorisation. Any mismatches can be flagged before transaction completion or after the fact to aid any dispute resolution.

What can Amex offer which Visa and Mastercard cannot?

Cart context is a great example of where Amex’s closed-loop network offers a level of data sharing that is much harder for open-network players to build. For Visa and Mastercard to have the same functionality, card issuers and card acquirers would need to capture this data and provide it back to the card schemes. Not impossible but much harder in an open-network model. Amex is able to set a clear standard for its network and is working with large merchants, platforms and payment providers such as OpenAI, Stripe, Adyen, Hilton and Expedia.

For cardholders, managing intents is a new challenge for issuers to reckon with. Cardholders will want to see and track what intents are open, at any one time. As agentic payments grow in scale and scope, the ability for cardholders to see key information in one place, and track their open intents will prove to be powerful:

Within the Amex mobile app, the customer will be able to see where their card is linked to their agent accounts. They’ll be able to see intents that they have previously approved. They’ll also be able to cancel them and adjust them.

For other card issuers, the ability for cardholders to view intents will need to be built as a new feature in-app and online. Some issuers will do this better than others. Some will make open intents easy to manage and visible at a glance, and other will struggle to get this right. If anything, it may become an important factor in analysing the best bank or issuer to work with for agent-linked payments.

Amex’s solution is for the US market initially with others to follow at a later stage. Globally more merchants accept Visa and Mastercard, the two largest American card schemes, than Amex. Outside of the US, Amex often has higher fees than Visa and Mastercard, with the UK and EU being clear examples of this. In Europe, there are additional challenges to contend with for agentic payments, such as the requirements around Secure Customer Authentication (SCA). Passkeys go some way towards meeting these requirements, but the question of whether one SCA-compliant authentication at the intent stage covers all downstream agent transactions is an open question.

For me, the question remaining is whether consumers really want agentic commerce. The proof will be in the data and usage in the coming years. But what I genuinely do like about the Amex solution is allowing cardholders to see their intent info in one place. Sometimes payment solutions get ahead of themselves — the tech may be exciting, but getting the consumer experience right isn't always easy. Here, the closed-loop network model has allowed Amex to deliver on that. Visa and Mastercard compete in slightly different ways, and helping issuers manage intents efficiently for their cardholders will become a key deliverable across both networks.

Next time, I'll take a detailed look at the consumer demand for agentic commerce and whether the hype is deserved.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture. I appreciate it!

Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. If you are not yet a subscriber please sign up below for a free or paid subscription.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), via email, and with the below button.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), via email.

Agentic commerce is one of the key themes of the moment, and one that I’ll be returning to time and again this year on Payments Culture. Payments infrastructure is evolving fast and in this newsletter, Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, makes the case that legacy rails are not up for the task of supporting agentic payments. He also makes the case for what can replace the legacy system. As with all guest contributions, the views are the author’s own.

The race to define agent-driven commerce is already well underway.

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal are all introducing frameworks designed for a world where software can search, compare, and transact on behalf of users. The scale of what this could become is enormous. Deloitte estimates that this shift could influence $17.5 trillion in global commerce by 2030, while McKinsey puts the opportunity at $3 to $5 trillion in orchestrated revenue.

There is no question that the demand is real and that serious capital and attention are moving in this direction.

What is less discussed is that the infrastructure these systems rely on was never designed for this model in the first place, and that mismatch is going to matter more than anything else.

Before getting into the infrastructure, it is worth being clear about how these systems behave. They are not emotional buyers. They do not respond to urgency, branding tricks, or scarcity cues. They optimize. A system managing spend will evaluate every option available, compare pricing and performance, and execute the most efficient outcome without hesitation or bias. Over time, that dynamic should compress margins and force genuine competition, which is ultimately a benefit for end users.

But that only happens if the underlying rails can actually support how these systems operate. Right now, they cannot.

Today’s payment infrastructure was built around human behavior. Identity verification assumes a person is present. Authorization flows assume someone is approving a transaction. Settlement cycles assume business hours. Fee structures assume transaction sizes that make sense for a human purchase.

Software does not operate within those constraints.

A system that is negotiating contracts, managing subscriptions, and executing usage-based payments across thousands of interactions per hour cannot wait for settlement windows to open, cannot absorb fixed fees on tiny transactions, and cannot depend on manual approval loops. When you try to run that kind of activity on existing rails, you do not get efficiency, you get friction at every step.

Efforts like Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Pay are important signals that the industry understands where things are going, but they are still working within the limitations of infrastructure that was designed for a different world. Adding new layers on top does not change the foundation.

If the buyer is software, then money itself needs to behave like software.

Onchain infrastructure functions as the key unlock in a future of programmable, software-based agents participating in financial transactions. These systems need programmable, always available money that can be viable globally, instantaneously.

An onchain economy is the only viable solution.

Programmability means that payments are no longer just transfers but embedded logic. A system can enforce rules on how funds are used, trigger payments when conditions are met, automatically split revenue , and settle obligations without manual intervention.

Always-on settlement matters because these systems operate continuously and globally. Settlement needs to happen in seconds, not days, regardless of time zones or weekends. On Polygon, that already happens in roughly two seconds at an average cost of less than a cent.

Equally important is the ability to support microtransactions. When the cost of moving value drops to fractions of a cent, entirely new economic models become possible. Payments can happen per API call, per data request, or per unit of compute. These systems operate at a granular level, requiring a financial model that works with the same level of targeted precision.

But even with fast, low-cost settlement, there is a second problem that becomes impossible to ignore: fragmentation.

Today, most payment stacks — including those built around stablecoins —are stitched together from multiple providers. Wallets, fiat onramps, compliance tooling, routing, and settlement all exist as separate layers. Each integration adds complexity, cost, and failure points. For systems that need to operate autonomously across platforms and jurisdictions, that model does not hold up.

We’re building the Open Money Stack (OMS) for a unified, single API integration that will give institutions and AI agents everything they need for global money movement — all in one place.

The OMS unites wallets, fiat access, compliance, routing, and onchain settlement into one composable layer. Built-in compliance and crypto-wide interoperability help round out the OMS’s unique offering, delivering an enterprise-grade solution for existing and new institutions.

Instead of forcing companies to rebuild their systems, any enterprise can plug in existing workflows and upgrade underlying rails to always-on, programmable settlement that works in seconds rather than days.

If money is going to move the way information moves, then the experience needs to feel as seamless. Users and systems should not have to think about chains, liquidity, or routing. Background infrastructure, which we’re building with the OMS, should handle all this invisibly, allowing value to move across networks, currencies, and formats without friction.

Core aspects of the Open Money Stack are already live.

In February 2026, Polygon processed 493 million stablecoin transactions, the highest monthly volume recorded on a single blockchain. Over the course of 2025, total stablecoin transfer volume reached $932 billion, representing a 264 percent year-over-year increase. By March 2026, Polygon ranked first globally in transaction count, and stablecoin supply on the network grew to $3.28 billion, significantly outpacing broader market growth.

The participants driving this activity are not limited to crypto-native companies. Revolut, which serves 65 million customers, selected Polygon as its primary blockchain infrastructure for payments, trading, and staking, and has already processed more than $1.2 billion in volume. Jio Platforms is bringing blockchain-based payments and digital identity to over 450 million users through JioCoin on Polygon.

At the same time, early forms of machine-to-machine payments are emerging. Polygon recently recorded $1.2 million in weekly x402 transfer volume, reflecting systems transacting with each other in real time.

The $17.5 trillion opportunity will be captured by building infrastructure that aligns with how these systems actually function, where money is programmable, composable, and always available.

We’re making sure the Open Money Stack is ready to capture this opportunity, so money can finally operate like the Internet.

Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. If you are not yet subscriber please sign up below for a free or paid subscription.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own (or in this case the contributors) and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

I’ve set up a reader survey for this newsletter.

It takes a maximum of 4 minutes to complete, and your feedback really helps me understand what is and isn’t working. One respondent, selected at random, will receive a $100 gift card. Thanks for your support with this.

You can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), via email, and with the below button.

I’m always interested in feedback, comments, collaboration opportunities, or perhaps you want to sponsor this newsletter?

I didn’t write on this Substack during March at all. This wasn’t my intention. And thanks for bearing with me during this time! There was a good reason for this.

I left London for Auckland on the 24th of February.

In New Zealand as well as spending time in Auckland I also visited Queenstown and Wellington. My flight back to London was on the 12th of March.

But I finally got back to London on the 1st of April.

My actual journey ended up like this:

Why did my journey get so much longer in terms of time and distance?

Quite simply, my flight back to London was cancelled due to the Iran war.

All flights going via the Middle East were stopped for a couple of weeks, and many routes have still not opened, or if they have, they are flying with a high risk of cancellation or last minute changes.

The airline I had booked my flight with informed me a couple of days before my return date that my flight was cancelled. To be honest, the writing had been on the wall. I’d watched the war kick-off during my first days in New Zealand and it was pretty clear that flight disruptions to the Middle East were not going to end anytime soon.

But expecting a flight cancellation and getting the official confirmation are two different things. When you get the confirmation then reality hits you: so how am I going to get home exactly?

In the first instance, you get an offer via email — the ability to rebook onto a new flight on the same airline, the same route, up to two weeks later. But I’d been following the situation closely, and I didn’t expect things to settle down within two weeks. So unless the airline was going to pay for my accommodation for me to wait around to see if the flight happened within those two weeks or not then this felt like a risk.

Unsure of the next step. I had to call the airline’s customer service line and discuss.

In order to speak to the airline, I had to wait until 10pm New Zealand time — the customer service number didn’t operate until 9am UK time (not very handy for a supposedly global airline). With this 13-hour time difference, I ended up waiting on hold for an hour, and finally spoke to someone after 11pm local time.

It would be easy to think that airlines can’t really help in such a situation — I mean there was a war going on. I get that. But under UK law airlines have certain obligations when a journey starts in the UK. Of course, the precise nature of these obligations will be contested in an unusual situation such as during wartime. Many companies claim force majeure during war, and this nullifies their contractual obligations entirely.

However, for airlines, the responsibilities remain. That said, they give me zero help in getting home. I mean really zero. No option to re-route via other airlines, and if I stuck around in New Zealand for a couple of weeks then the chance of getting accommodation costs covered seemed slim.

I decided the only option was to find my own route back and complain to the airline later. Although, as you can imagine this wasn’t an easy task. Many British travellers that visit Australia, New Zealand, places in Asia, and even destinations in Africa often fly via Dubai, Qatar or Abu Dhabi. The Middle East has become a key transit hub for British travellers. In this scenario it meant many people were stranded, and quickly the alternative flight options disappeared.

I spent a couple of evenings awake until 3 a.m. in my Airbnb in Wellington, where I was attending a close family wedding. I was searching flights on Google Flights trying to figure out alternative routes back to London. Unless I wanted to pay £3,500 for a one way economy ticket from Kuala Lumpur to London in ten days time (this was literally the only availability I could find in mid-March), it felt like the best option was to wait things out for a couple of weeks.

With a combination of airmiles I’d accumulated over the years, a desire to travel somewhere new, and helped by the fact I didn’t need to be back in the UK with any urgency, I decided to spend a bit longer in New Zealand before flying to Taipei, and eventually flying back to London from Seoul on April 1st. My trip was extended by 20 days.

It turned out to be a solo travel experience that I thought had long passed me by. Overall I had a great time, and it’s given me plenty to write about in the weeks ahead.

Building with Claude Code

In my last post I wrote about building with AI and how some fintech startups are moving much faster with AI. Through my own experimentation and building I’ve got to experience this in a limited way first hand, and while I didn’t publish anything on this Substack while I was traveling, I did launch two payments dashboards — I’ll explain more about these shortly.

Firstly, for someone who is not technical (eg. me), using Claude Code has been a revelation. Until the start of this year I had stayed away from what has become known as vibe coding, or coding via prompting, chatting to an AI model and giving it instructions, rather than writing code directly. Yet after Christmas I started with Claude Code and never looked back.

My first encounters were somewhat mundane and unrelated to professional matters. One project was building an app to help track the first 100 days in the life of a new puppy. I was surprised at the results and quickly got thinking how I could build payments some payments-related projects.

I built a crypto wallet. I never made this public, and don’t intend to as if I put the solution public then there will be regulatory aspects to consider. Additionally the app doesn’t have any particular USP compared to other options on the market, and ultimately with crypto projects there’s a need to raise funds for marketing an other aspects. It’s not a good use case for a one man project. Despite this, I learned a lot as building it was a great experience in learning how the various building blocks fit together when building a wallet application.

The app I built includes:

• A USDC1 stablecoin wallet built on Base2 that lets anyone send and receive money globally for under $0.01 per transaction.

• Users never need to manage private keys or pay gas fees.

• Dynamic handles authentication and wallet creation, so users can sign up with email or social login and get a wallet instantly

• It offers the ability to create shareable payment request links that can be shared via WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS.

• Anyone with a USDC wallet (Coinbase, MetaMask, etc.) can pay a request link instantly at near-zero cost.

• For people who don’t have USDC yet, there are fiat on-ramps via card, bank transfer, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PIX, PayPal, and Revolut Pay.

• You can deposit any idle USDC balance into Aave or Moonwell to earn yield directly in app.

• The app supports 12 languages and auto-detects your region to show the most relevant payment methods first

While this app sits as a perpetual work in progress I moved onto working on projects that could have wider use and relevance. These two projects were driven by a simple realisation that often the data I wanted — in order to learn more about a topic and to write about it on this Substack — was often really hard to find. When it was available it might not be easy to export or visualise. Could I make something better for my own benefit and for the benefit of others also?

Stablecoin Dashboard

Provided an API exists then with Claude Code you can pull data into a chart, a website, or build an app. I remember looking for data about stablecoins last summer and struggling to find data I wanted in a format I liked. With this in mind I started to build out a stablecoin dashboard.

The dashboard is live here: https://stablecoindashboard.net

The result is useful and accessible data on the stablecoin market. You can see information such as stablecoin circulation value (sometimes referred to as market cap) by each of the top 100 USD-pegged stablecoins, and you can choose from custom or a preset date range. The main dataset can be download as a CSV file or a PNG image file. Additionally there’s information such as the top non-USD pegged coins, net issuance charts per coin, and details of what blockchain(s) each coin uses.3

Most of the data updates daily at 00.00 UTC, however the peg watch function is real-time, and tracks how close the two largest stablecoins stay to $1.00. Maximum deviations from the peg by time period provides a historical view of just how stable USDT and USDC have actually been.

There’s a weekly and monthly analysis function which updates at a set time each week/month and is based on the various data on the dashboard at a certain point in time. This gives a useful text summary and analysis which can be easily shared online.

The weekly analysis is posted on this Substack.

With this project I was impressed at how well Claude Code analysed various APIs and suggested which would be best based on my requirements. I kept prompting to get the UI that I wanted. It may sound effortless but in reality it takes many hours of back and forth to get anything worthwhile to develop. Then the iteration begins. More consideration of what could be useful, more gradual additions of data and improvements to the interface. The goal with stablecoin dashboard is to add transaction information to sit alongside the circulation data.

Real-Time Payments Dashboard

Several times when writing this Substack I’ve wanted to get information on real-time payment systems.4 By how much did India’s UPI increase year-on-year? What was the volume of Pix transactions in 2025? In the UK, what share of card payment transactions is Faster Payments? Usually to get the answers to these questions you’d need to go to the website for each payment system, their regulator, or another official body and look up the data — often a very manual process. I couldn’t find any source showing all of real-time payment systems in one place. So this is what I decided to develop.

The dashboard is live here: https://rtpdashboard.net

There’s data available for 32 payment systems. Some go back two years and some go back much longer. You’ll notice that some systems only have annual data, whereas others have monthly data. Wherever possible I’m trying to add additional data but I am hamstrung by what actually exists and is published online

To give you an example, here’s the different types of data that different payment systems publicly offer:

• Pix (Brazil) — The Brazilian Central Bank (BCB) has an open data portal with near-real-time stats. The Pix API publishes monthly data, however the BCB also offers daily data on their portal, which makes Pix by far the best data source out of all the 32 systems.

• Faster Payments (UK) — Pay.UK publishes monthly data but only as PDF files, and there is no live API.

• FedNow / RTP (US) — Both publish quarterly data through the Federal Reserve and The Clearing House respectively. No real-time API.

• PromptPay (Thailand) — The Bank of Thailand has a portal where data can be download in a CSV format, which is better than most systems, but no live API yet.

• UPI (India) — NPCI publishes monthly data on their website but it’s JavaScript-rendered, not an easily readable API.

• Zengin (Japan) — Zengin-Net publishes monthly PDFs going back many years, but each month is a separate PDF file that needs manual parsing.

It's somewhat ironic that so many advanced payment systems can't even offer basic monthly statistics. The world moved to APIs. But the data offered by regulators and other bodies that manage these systems, largely, did not.

As well as being able to see charts and compare various systems, the dashboard has a table view showing all systems side-by-side. You can compare volume, value, and other key metrics for 2024 and 2025 all in one place. As monthly data isn’t easily available for most systems updates will follow quarterly or even annually in some cases. However, I will try to close more data gaps whenever possible.

Let me know any feedback or comments on these dashboards when you get chance to use them. I’ll be adding their links to future posts on this Substack too.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture. I appreciate it!

Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. If you are not yet subscriber please sign up below for a free or paid subscription.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

I hope you’ve had a good start to the year. It feels like it’s rained every day in the UK so far in 2026. In fact, this is the case for some places: a village in Cornwall had 50 consecutive days of rain. While we endure this deluge, we get plenty of chance to stay indoors, to write, and experiment with AI 🥲

Before getting into this week’s essay — a few short updates:

• I’ve set up a reader survey for this newsletter. It takes a maximum of 4 minutes to complete, and your feedback really helps me understand what is and isn’t working. One respondent, selected at random, will receive a $100 gift card. I would really appreciate if you could take a few minutes to share your thoughts.

• This January I took on a position as Co-Editor of the UK and Europe edition of This Week in Fintech. This means I put together the region's newsletter every other week. Each edition of This Week in Fintech (TWIF) is focused on fintech news from the past week, rather than long-form writing (like this newsletter), so it works as a nice complement to writing Payments Culture.

• I recently did an interview with Yap Global, a leading financial and technology PR consultancy. From reading the interview you can learn which book I was reading on a beach in Malta back in 2025, and my thoughts on how the payments industry has changed over the years.

• I’ll be in New Zealand for much of the next three weeks. If any of my readers are based in Aotearoa let me know. It’d be interesting to learn more about the local fintech scene over at flat white or two.

As ever, you can contact me on LinkedIn, on Twitter (X), via email, and here.

Finding Claude Code

Last month I spent some time with my parents in the countryside in Wales. My grandma was sick and nearing the end of her life. My mom and aunt were providing round-the-clock care. I was helping wherever I could, sometimes this meant taking care of the dog (who woke me up one night at 4am by licking my face), other times it meant providing emotional support, and being on hand with whatever was needed. Whenever I found the time, I tried writing. I had half-finished essays I wanted to get done, but I often struggled. With everything that was going on it was tough to concentrate.

Although I did unexpectedly pick up something else. It was a tool suited to dipping in and out whenever time allowed. Like many of you reading, I’ve been using a variety of LLMs over the past couple of years. I experimented, and soon, Chat GPT and Claude became my apps of choice (these are not LLMs themselves, rather they are interfaces to a selection of various proprietary LLMs developed by two of the largest AI companies — Open AI and Anthropic). I’d not yet seriously tried what often gets described as Vibe Coding. Building with prompts rather than having to know programming in any depth. Yet I started to tinker with Claude Code, which sits within the Claude app, or can be used in a more developer-centric terminal interface.

My grandma was born in 1928, into a world very different from our own. A world in which a basic radio was a rarity and outdoor toilets were still common in much of the UK. Almost one hundred years later, we can build complex software in days and launch globally in weeks. My grandma lived long enough to see the internet and smartphones — although, like many people of her generation, her interactions with technology were largely through her family sharing photos and videos on our devices. She passed away a little over a month ago while I was still in Wales. I wrote this essay on the way back from her funeral. 

I’ve spent much of the past month working on various projects with Claude Code. In my opinion, we’re in the midst of the biggest move in AI since Chat GPT went viral a few years back (in November 2022). In the previous phase of AI building, many startups built AI wrappers, with software that links to and interacts with AI models. The downside of such an approach was the challenge of providing more value than a user could get from using an LLM directly, and the ever-present risk of depending on the underlying AI model in terms of cost and platform risk. Companies who build AI wrappers always run the risk of the model provider itself moving into the product category and competing directly, or the model provider helping others compete with you.

This new era is a paradigm shift in consumer and corporate AI. We’ve had chatbots that gave us answers to almost any question in the world, and now, in this new phase centred on AI coding, users can build their own products directly rather than merely adding a wrapper around a model. The AI is now a co-creation tool that can help plan, provide options, and do the work that previously would have taken teams of engineers and other staff. 

The newsletter and consultancy Semi-Analysis recently highlighted this change:

We believe that Claude Code is the inflection point for AI “Agents” and is a glimpse into the future of how AI will function. It is set to drive exceptional revenue growth for Anthropic in 2026, enabling the lab to dramatically outgrow OpenAI.

While there have been various tools centred around building with AI, it’s Claude Code which has really broken through. Tools such as Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf are still valuable. But the recent change in perception has largely emanated from a slew of stories that emerged over the past couple of months, highlighting the leap in capability in the latest updates to Claude Code.

• In January, a senior Google engineer noted that the latest version of Claude Code, running on the Opus 4.6 model, was able to produce complex distributed systems architecture in one hour, which her team had spent a full year building.

• In Silicon Valley thousands of software engineers spent their Christmas holiday period experimenting with the latest version of Claude Code. In what became known as Claude Christmas, some engineers came back to work in the new year with the refrain that coding is “now solved”. The big leap was that not only did Claude Code help developers work more quickly, but it proposed architecture, presented plans, and “execute[s] sophisticated projects with little — or no — human guidance” (an excellent piece in the San Francisco Standard goes into this in a lot more detail).

• Various software companies have seen their shares drop by 35% or more since the start of the year, as investors question whether existing moats remain relevant. If a competitor can build a comparable product in a matter of weeks, software becomes less defensible.

There have even been reports that many highly skilled and prolific software engineers have entirely stopped writing their own code. Senior engineers in global firms such as Spotify have barely written any code directly since December. Andrej Karpathy, an AI expert and part of the founding team at Open AI states that agent-led coding is around 80% of his workflow, with the remaining 20% for manual edits. He commented that this is “easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks.”

This is a trend which is only getting started. Again from Semi-Analysis:

Coders will stop doing code and rather request jobs to be done on their behalf. And the magic of Claude Code is it just works. Many famous coders are finally giving into the new wave of vibe coding and now realizing that coding is effectively close to a solved problem that is better off supported by Agents than humans.

Though, despite the clear breakthrough, not everyone is sold on the short-term impact of AI. Ethan Mollick, an author and keen observer of AI’s impact on the workplace, has cautioned against assuming change will happen as quickly as many forecast.

The question is whether companies trapped by corporate inertia will be overtaken by those who move more quickly.

In the fintech domain I’ve recently spoken with founders who are using agent-led coding to move at a much faster pace than previously possible. Not slightly faster, but multiple times faster. Work that might have taken a week can be done in a day. This means more experimentation and the ability to rule things out if they don’t work, testing and learning day by day, rather than waiting on weeks of development resource before a new feature can be tried and tested. However, competitors will also have the same possibilities, and not all companies are looking at this the same way. Some fintechs are cautious of using AI, scared and scarred by hallucinations when they’ve previously tried, but the technology has moved so fast, that those who do not embrace AI run big risks.

Different industries will be impacted differently. At the task level, many aspects of fintech are ripe for disruption. The extent to which some large banks and legacy payment providers still process activities manually seemed antiquated years ago, let alone today. The question is whether to disrupt from within or watch the market move right past you. As Matt Schumer, CEO of OthersideAI, recently noted:

The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant.

Based on my own research and analysis, I estimate that companies that required $50m funding a few years back, will now be able to build the same product for $5m or less. 

This doesn’t mean to say that similar levels of capital won’t be required to build great companies. But expectations will change. What can be built for a certain level of capital will change, and every company will be scrutinised differently. In this new world possibilities will grow and compound as new opportunities open up. Predicting winners and losers in any fintech category will get harder, as growth becomes less linear, and expansion, whether horizontal (into new segments) or vertical (into new product lines), will at the same time have the potential to be faster than ever, yet less predictable.

In some areas, up until now, fintechs have formed a competitive moat by being the first to market and building strong customer relationships with a product that was “good enough” — now, the components of moats will change. In regulated financial services, it’s often thought that licences to operate in specific markets, relationships with regulators, and compliance practices can themselves form part of a competitive moat. Though my instinct is that this discussion will keep evolving, and the reality may not be so black and white. In the future, what forms a defensible moat could be quite different from what we think today. 

In fact, a sense of community, independent of the quality of software itself, could be a key defensive moat. Personal relationships take time to build, and no vibe-coded app or AI-led initiative can replace real-life interactions. That is, until AI agents start getting their own social community! Which has already started to happen with the Moltbook phenomenon. A foretaste of things to come?

Thanks for reading Payments Culture! In a future post I’ll share what I’ve actually been building with Claude Code over the past month. Following this I have some collaboration posts planned, and some longer analysis posts are in progress.

Please leave a comment or share with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. It’s much appreciated and helps grow the audience of this newsletter.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

Ukraine has been at war since 2014. That was when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and conflict soon erupted in the eastern Donbas region. Despite the human cost, much of the world took little notice. It was seen as a low-intensity conflict — something to be managed, and to much of the international community, an annoyance they hoped would go away. The Minsk negotiations were a sign of this approach. Yet in February 2022, with the full-scale Russian invasion, everything changed.

“The first challenge after February 2022 was: does the financial infrastructure still work?“ Andrew explained to me that in war, things we take for granted are under threat.

“Can you pay in a store? Can a business accept payments? Does the client have access to funds?” All of these basic questions were in flux.

Not only was Ukraine under bombardment from physical attack, but cyber attacks on national infrastructure — including core financial systems — were part of the assault from day one. The maelstrom of war meant keeping the financial lights on was a big challenge in itself.

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A new operational discipline emerged. “Redundancy, duplication, cybersecurity, strict risk monitoring — all became more fundamental than ever before.” But Andrew was clear that it wasn’t all plain sailing. “It’s not to say there weren’t challenges in the early days. There was, of course, uncertainty in the first couple of months following February 2022.” Yet soon enough, Ukrainians realised that payment and banking services — essential to daily life — continued to operate, with only limited interruption.

In fact, Ukraine's financial system has held up better than anyone could have expected given the circumstances.

Plenty has been written about Ukraine's evolution — even revolution — in the military domain. What worked four years ago has changed; the war itself has changed over time. Ukrainian-American journalist David Kirichenko, writing for the Atlantic Council, described Ukraine as a "drone superpower", noting that many Western countries have a lot to learn from Ukraine when it comes to emerging military tactics and technology.

But while the world has watched Ukraine transform its tactics under fire, the story of how Ukraine's financial sector adapted is rarely told. The results are equally impressive. My conversation with Andrew only scratches the surface, but it provides real-life examples of resilience in practice.

Ukraine’s banking infrastructure

To understand how Ukraine’s infrastructure has held up during wartime, it helps to appreciate the historical context. Ten years back, Ukraine’s tech culture was running ahead of Western markets in some respects. Partly this was due to talent. Andrew highlighted that Ukraine has, for a long time, had a “developer first entrepreneurial mindset” and a deep pool of software developers, some of whom gained experience working for international firms. That experience soon flowed back into local products and companies.

One foundational difference between payments and banking in Western Europe and Ukraine was the use of card-based versus account-based infrastructure. Ukraine was a card-first market, though in a different way to what you might expect. In terms of payments, the UK is a card-centric market. We use contactless cards, either directly or via Apple Pay, to make the vast majority of our purchases, but in Ukraine, cards are also used for sending money. Both major international card schemes have long offered products that allow money to be sent from card to card. Visa Money Transfer and Mastercard MoneySend were precursors of the current products we know as Visa Direct and Mastercard Send. In Ukraine, person-to-person payments were card-to-card payments. In Western Europe, this would usually mean account-to-account payments.

Privatbank was central to this growth of cards as a means of money transfer. Founded in 1992, it became Ukraine’s largest bank and a genuine innovator. Early on, the bank built out specific products for different customer segments, such as retail, SMBs, and large corporates. LiqPay, its e-wallet, became a key payment method for small businesses and is still widely used today.

When Privatbank was nationalised in 2016, many expected the tech-first culture to fade away. But this didn’t happen. The bank maintained its pace of innovation even under state ownership.

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This brings us to Monobank. Founded by former Privatbank execs, Monobank is Ukraine’s leading neobank — a bank with no branches. It took only weeks for the bank to gain one million customers when it launched in 2017, and in 2025 it reached the milestone of ten million customers.

Rather than holding its own banking licence, Monobank operates under the licence of Universal Bank, which is a longstanding commercial bank in Ukraine. Universal Bank is regarded as one of the country’s systemically important banks, but it does not have a substantial consumer banking unit. In essence, Monobank was created as Universal Bank’s retail proposition, and the arrangement suits both parties — the Monobank team gets to focus on helping customers rather than dealing with regulation and licensing. 

This customer focus soon becomes evident. Looking at Monobank’s homepage, compared with banks in the UK and much of the EU, it’s easy to see a whole host of innovative products and solutions that don’t exist in Western Europe. For example:

• The ability to contact the bank’s customer support and concierge services via the Telegram messenger app.

• Short-term loans known as “until tomorrow” which usually last from a few days to a month and can be provided quickly to customers who need short-term capital.

• Credit and debit cards with both Visa and Mastercard on one card — users get specific perks and discounts tied to each card brand.

• A live dashboard that shows customer spending across the bank in real time, by category and at the merchant level.

And then there’s the eRecovery card — a social programme providing funds to those whose homes have been damaged during the war. A product that could only exist in Ukraine right now.

I asked Andrew how Monobank compares to Revolut, which is the closest reference point I have. “Very comparable,” he said, “and in some aspects Monobank is even better.” Looking at what they’ve built, it’s hard to argue. Although, sadly, as the bank only operates in Ukraine, it’s difficult to experience it firsthand.

Kiosks and cards

Today Ukraine is home to one of the world’s leading neobanks and other innovations. But back in the 2000s and 2010s, physical payment kiosks were a common sight in malls and supermarkets.

Payment kiosks are self-service terminals operating under brands such as EasyPay and iBox. They allow people to pay utility bills, top up mobile accounts, and add cash to bank cards instantly. While mobile banking has grown rapidly, kiosks remain relevant as an offline payment channel, especially in smaller cities and in times when people value redundancy and accessibility.

As a sharp contrast to kiosk infrastructure, data from Mastercard highlights Ukraine’s advanced attitudes to digital payments. 41% of Ukrainians surveyed carry only a digital card — such as in their Apple Wallet — and more than 95% of card-present transactions are contactless payments. It is this balance between physical infrastructure and digital technology, not only in the financial system, but in broader society that has held Ukraine in good stead during wartime.

Innovation during war

Monobank added jars to its app in 2019 (банка in Ukrainian). Similar in many ways to Monzo’s concept of pots, Monobank’s jars allow users to set up a savings account with specific goals, often with visual cues — if you’re saving for a holiday, why not add an image of a beach? As you may have anticipated, Monobank has taken this one step further than many other neobanks. Users can send a link on messenger apps for friends and family to add to jars, anyone can contribute (not just Monobank customers), and even Apple Pay can be used to pay into a jar.

In 2022 jars took on a new purpose. When the full-scale invasion happened, the military needed equipment faster than government procurement could manage. Ukrainians began using jars to collect donations to support the war effort. Volunteers, including friends, family, and work colleagues of those on the frontline, and society at large stepped in. People gave whatever hryvnias they could afford. Jars were set up to buy body armour, medical supplies, and thermal imaging equipment. To facilitate this cultural phenomenon, Monobank stepped up.

“People just intuitively started to use jars to collect donations,” Andrew explained. “And Monobank created a separate product for donations.” Additionally, foreign cardholders were soon able to add to jars, leading to links being shared on social media as Western citizens sought to help the Ukrainian war effort. Some years earlier such transactions would have likely been blocked by the payment processor in Ukraine or the card issuer in the UK (for example), yet they worked easily and seamlessly in most cases.

The innovation hasn't been limited to jars. Like much of the world, Ukraine has seen significant growth in BNPL in recent years. These solutions are powered by a mix of banks and specialist BNPL providers. The sector is well-regulated and operates within Ukraine's financial and consumer credit framework. It has become a useful means for consumers to spread out payments during times of uncertainty.

Diia and European integration

A couple of years ago, I spent some time in Estonia. I discovered that it’s a country where almost everything can be done online, and done efficiently too. Almost zero paperwork, and integrations that make life much easier than anything we have in the UK. From talking with Andrew, I learned that Ukraine’s e-government system, known as Diia (Дія, meaning "action" in Ukrainian), is perhaps even better. “I would say that Diia is by far better than other e-government apps.” This got me intrigued. He added, “I couldn’t name any similar project in the world which has such sophisticated functionality.”

The array of functions Diia supports is impressive.

Within the Diia app, users can store identity documents and driving licences, track traffic fines, monitor debts, and access a wide array of government services. The Akurateco team told me about one particular feature that I wanted to highlight as it’s something specific to the situation the country finds itself in. Inside Diia, users can buy Military Bonds. These government-issued war bonds are named after Ukrainian cities and places under occupation — for example Alchevsk (Алчевськ), Foros (Форос), and Livadia (Лівадія) — adding a symbolic layer to the investment product.

Ukraine is aiming to join the European Union in the coming years. This means aligning with various financial-sector frameworks. Andrew explained that Ukraine’s central bank has been proactive in this area. “Even now we are ready to meet the criteria and requirements. In some cases, Ukrainian regulations are already stricter than EU standards require.”

Despite the ongoing war, this focus on European integration is important.

Reconstruction and claiming a place in the wider European project is key to Ukraine’s future. Yet it’s not only in military terms that the West has a lot to learn from Ukraine. When it comes to the financial sector and wider technological innovation, Ukraine is leading the way, and much of Europe has plenty of catching up to do.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture!

It was great working with Andrew, Kateryna, and the Akurateco team on this post. It’s a topic I have long wanted to learn more about, and even though we barely scratched the surface, I hope it gives readers a useful window into Ukraine's story.

Akurateco is a payment software vendor offering a white-label payment orchestration solution for acquiring banks, PSPs, and enterprise merchants. Around 50% of the team is currently based in Ukraine, and they continue operating despite wartime conditions — something that has shaped not only their internal resilience, but also how they think about reliability, redundancy, and uptime in payments.

In 2024, Akurateco was selected as part of Ukraine’s official delegation to London Tech Week, alongside seven other Ukrainian startups — highlighting their role within the broader Ukrainian fintech ecosystem that keeps building internationally while remaining closely connected to the realities on the ground.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

You tell me: If you were in Mexico City, would you rather have a crisp $50 bill in your pocket, or try to explain to your taxi driver how to set up a Bitcoin wallet? As a means of payment nothing comes close to US dollar bills.

Almost anywhere in the world, businesses accept dollars for goods or services (surprisingly you can pay with dollars in North Korea). Even if officially you can’t pay with USD in-store in many countries, unofficially, everyone knows it’s the currency that’s easiest to exchange, and whose value is universally recognised.

But go to any stablecoin event, and you’ll notice how most founders focus on the technical feat - moving money on-chain or from wallet to wallet. There’s a deeper story yet to unfold. Let’s consider that, at least so far, the story of stablecoins is the story of digital dollars. And the dollar itself, whether physical or digital, is the de facto global currency.

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Stablecoins gained acclaim in 2025 as a means of moving dollars around the world at low cost. Yet we are in an era of shifting paradigms of money, where a maelstrom of forces intersect and the outcome is unknown. The next years will see the bifurcation of money unfold at breakneck pace — it’s a split between private and sovereign (government) money. How you're affected depends on your geography, and what's in your (digital) wallet.

In geopolitics, analysts often talk of a move from a unipolar to a multipolar world. A world in which US dominance is met with a spate of rising powers.

Writing in a recent edition of Wired UK, economist and author Keyu Jin states that “2026 will be the year when the US dollar dilution starts to build momentum”, and economies in the BRICS bloc are working on schemes such as mBridge and BRICS Pay, which bypass the current US-led financial system.

But according to Helen Thomas “it’s one thing to want the dollar to be less important and another thing for the dollar to be less important” (emphasis mine). Stablecoins may have something to say about this so-called dollar dilution. Measured by market capitalisation US dollar stablecoins account for nearly 99% of the stablecoin market. Despite their role as private money — as opposed to central bank-issued money — stablecoins are held 1-1 with reserve assets such as US Treasuries, making them a de facto arm of the US financial system.

What are the implications for a world in which digital dollars reach across economies fuelled by venture capital and tech innovation? And how does this challenge the thesis of diminishing dollar dominance? First, let’s understand how we got here.

The rise of the dollar

In the 19th century, the British Pound, bolstered by the reach of the British Empire, was the world’s number one currency. During the First World War, the global dominance of the Great British Pound, often known as Sterling, on international currency markets began to weaken. The United Kingdom and her Empire spent more than it could afford to on the war. The Second World War, just over two decades later, exacerbated the decline of sterling. Despite Britain “winning”, it was financially ruined, the trade empire collapsed and the US took the reins as the global hegemon. Since 1945 the US has been the world’s dominant power. And with global hard power (military) hegemony comes currency dominance.

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As global powers rise and fall, currency wars happen. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. Since 1945, not only has the US Dollar (cash) become the de facto global currency, but the main international card networks — Visa and Mastercard — are outgrowths of what started as US domestic payment systems. In the 1960s, there were only a handful of banks that issued Visa or Mastercard (all in the US), but today there are more than 10,000 issuers of Visa and Mastercard.

Even though Visa and Mastercard allow settlement in many currencies, a large share of transactions go via US Dollars. There are several reasons for this. Many countries clear through the dollar system rather than their domestic currency. Visa and Mastercard’s fees are often in Dollars, and many central banks don’t have the level of liquidity required to settle FX in their local currency.

The global payments system, as we know it, is dollar-centric. Stablecoins are the next frontier of dollar dominance. Everyone wants dollars. And, as it stands, stablecoins are often the best way to send, receive, and hold dollars. Crypto wallets, and increasingly neobanks such as Revolut are adding stablecoin functionality, thus allowing users to hold and transact in digital dollars. Added to this are the fintech startups backed by some of the leading venture capitalists in the world today.

As well as the dollar as we’ve long known it, startups everywhere are building for a world that interacts with, and uses, the digital dollar.

Some examples include DolarApp based in Mexico. The app can hold dollars (USD) or stablecoin dollars (USDC) — but to the user there’s no difference. The app logic decides which to use and when. Users only see a general dollar balance covering both assets, and USDC specifically is shown only when needed (for instance, when sending funds to another crypto wallet). Businesses can also set up accounts and send digital dollars 24/7 and near-instantly, whereas fiat dollars are stuck in the banking system paradigm of operating only in business hours.

Funding: In 2022, Dolar App raised a $5M seed round led by Y Combinator and Kaszek Ventures

Karsa is building a global bank based on dollar stablecoins with Pakistan set to be one of the first markets. The app features a USD account and a linked card, with the ability to earn interest on the account balance. Actually, Karsa’s website says interest in one section, and yield in another. Yield is the correct term. With crypto-based accounts, including stablecoins, yield refers to funds earning passive income in the crypto markets — and is not guaranteed. Hence, yield is sometimes provided as a range or based on current expectations rather than a set figure, as in traditional bank accounts or term deposits.

Funding: Karsa was part of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, but has not raised a large funding round so far.

ZAR is aiming to build a global dollar wallet. Like with Karsa, Pakistan is ZAR’s first market. Although given their funding, the goal is to expand into additional markets sooner rather than later.

USDC is the stablecoin powering the app, and while the company mentions “your dollars, wherever you live”, they have also clearly catered to local nuances, and importantly, local compliance! The homepage mentions that, due to currency controls, some countries do not allow funds to be sent abroad. Addressing market-specific challenges is the right approach, especially if startups want to stay on the right side of local regulators. However, the more local nuances are catered to, the less global appeal a stablecoin wallet may have, particularly as users can always opt for a full-fat crypto exchange.

As well as individual accounts, ZAR offers merchant payment acceptance for businesses and an ambassador programme to allow users to benefit from bringing in new merchants. Showing how a stablecoin startup can build payment infrastructure as well as a wallet experience.

Funding: ZAR is the best funded of the three companies mentioned here. The company has raised a total of $20m, including a recent $12.9m funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Dragonfly Capital, VanEck Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures also investing.

The downside of digital dollars

Startups —such as those noted above — exist due to genuine consumer demand in non-Western economies for access to dollars. Yet for the world outside the US, dollar stablecoins are not risk-free. They benefit those in countries whose currencies are unstable, and who would prefer to get dollars, but for Hélène Rey, Lord Raj Bagri Professor of Economics at London Business School, there’s another side which should be considered:

For the rest of the world, including Europe, wide adoption of US dollar stablecoins for payment purposes would be equivalent to the privatization of seigniorage by global actors. Along with easier flows linked to tax evasion, fiscal accounts could be affected. On the asset side, the backing of stablecoins means that increased international adoption of those pegged to the dollar could lower demand for non–US government bonds and raise demand for US Treasuries.

As the creation of money, at least in part, moves from governments and central banks to privately run stablecoin issuers, those issuers benefit from the profit of creating currency. But it seems inevitable that the line between fiat and crypto dollars will lessen. The line between sovereign and private money will, in some cases, dissolve, at least as far as the user is concerned.

The CEO of Tether, Paolo Ardoino, whose company issues the world’s largest stablecoin, with more than $183bn in circulation at the time of writing, is explicit about the reality of digital dollars. Last year, in an interview with the Guardian, he made clear his perspective:

We have 400 million users in emerging markets. We are basically selling the US debt outside the US … We are decentralizing the US debt as well, basically pushing for dollar hegemony. That’s how the US can maintain its dominance when it comes to its currency.

Yet as digital dollars grow in prominence, there’s an increasing risk that nations lose control of monetary policy. The more an economy becomes de facto dollarised, the less impact interest rate policy has. It takes a long time to reach that point, but it could be the end result for some nations in the years ahead. Ecuador gave up its domestic currency back in 2000, which has meant no independent interest rate policy, and no ability to strengthen or devalue the currency — even when local conditions call for it. The rise in digital dollars could make this shift happen organically, without a country formally choosing it.

How will policy makers respond? That’s another story. Sometimes it feels like tech and venture funding is running ahead of government and regulators. Why is this the case? Put simply. Everyone wants dollars.

Further reading:

Stablecoin growth – policy challenges and approaches (BIS Bulletin No. 108)

Top of Mind — Stablecoin Summer (Goldman Sachs Research)

Why the world should worry about Stablecoins (Martin Wolf in the Financial Times)

Thanks for reading Payments Culture. I appreciate it!

Please leave a comment or share with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. It’s much appreciated and helps grow the audience of this newsletter.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice

Did you read?

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

Originally, this was going to be an essay on the key fintech trends worth watching in 2026, and my predictions for where the industry is heading. You can probably guess some of the topics: stablecoins, agentic commerce, mobile wallets, and so on. Nothing too unique or remarkable. Likely 90% of the other 2026 prediction posts you’ve read would be similar. But don’t stop reading — at least not yet, because when I started to think a bit more deeply, I started to notice something else.

In this edition: why almost every trend in payments is impacted by our fracturing world, geopolitical competition is seeping through every layer of what we once thought were apolitical networks and rails. In short, fintech is getting messier.

Last week in Davos, Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, gave a speech that was lauded by many analysts for stating the reality of the world in 2026.

Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry… Many countries are drawing the same conclusions. They must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance, and supply chains.

This analysis is spot on.

We can all see that the world is mired in tariffs, sanctions, wars, uncertainty. There’s no sign that these trends will decelerate. If anything, we are in a new normal. The world that we had from 1991 to 20221 has gone. The era of relative world peace that lasted from the end of the Cold War to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine2 is over.

The changing dynamics

Today’s flux is partly because the unipolar moment is over.

For the past thirty years or so the US was the only superpower in town. In recent years the relative strength of other countries and blocs has increased. US domestic politics is changing the foreign policy discussion, with the US now focusing increasingly on the Western hemisphere (as seen in November 2025’s National Security Strategy document). Europe is beginning to stand on its own two feet, and Chinese influence is spreading globally.

To understand what all this means for fintech, we need to talk about geopolitics.

It’s a word we hear more and more in the news. Sometimes overused. But understanding how states and organisations interact through the convergence of power, resources, geography and technology is a useful lens for analysing how interconnected systems create both opportunity and vulnerability.

Fintech doesn’t exist in a vacuum — although sometimes industry commentary makes it sound as if it does. We often focus — and we can all be guilty of this — on the latest big trends, gigantic funding rounds, and outsized personalities while some of the biggest shifts, which really make the difference in fintech, are often missed.

How money moves is ever-changing, yet exactly how you’re impacted depends on your geography. In part, this is because geopolitics and fintech rub shoulders every day. You’ll find this dynamic in news stories nestled in the New York Times, The Economist, the Financial Times and beyond.

Consider a few examples from the past decade or so:

A post-Maduro bounce for e-commerce in Latin America?

• Mercado Libre is Latin America’s answer to a super app. Almost 30 cents of every dollar spent online in the region is via the platform. In terms of fintech, Mercado Pago is its fintech arm, processing more than $142bn in payment volume in 2024.

• Following the intervention of the US military in Venezuela and the ousting of President Maduro, Mercado Libre’s share price increased substantially. Climbing by 10% in the three days that followed the military operation.

• In fact, stock markets across the region, including Venezuela’s, popped in the days that followed the raid. After over a decade of less-than-favourable economic policies (from the perspective of capitalism and free enterprise), investors are hoping that the Venezuelan economy will finally stabilise. Firms such as Mercado Libre may soon reap the rewards.

Visa and Mastercard’s exit from Russia

• Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, as a result of US sanctions, Visa and Mastercard cut off several Russian banks from their payment networks, including Bank Rossiya, which US and EU officials claimed was the bank for Putin’s inner circle.

• In response, Russia created the National Payment Card System (NSPK) to ensure all transactions stayed within local data centres. Additionally, a domestic payment scheme called Mir was established to insulate the Russian economy from further impacts of sanctions.

• In the years that followed, several countries began to accept Mir cards. These were countries that are neutral or even friendly with Russia. For instance, Turkey, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Abkhazia — an occupied area of Georgia that’s under Russian control. (Cuba announced acceptance of Mir cards a bit later, in 2023.)

• In 2022, following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Visa and Mastercard withdrew entirely from Russia. The country made up around 4% of each company's revenue in 2021. PayPal and American Express also exited Russia at the same time.

• In the past few years many countries have stopped accepting Mir cards at ATMs and blocked them for payment acceptance. Turkey is one such example, and countries that still accept Mir cards often severely limit their acceptance due to the fear of secondary sanctions from the US.

India bans Chinese e-commerce apps

• In 2020, following clashes in the disputed Ladakh region, India banned tens of Chinese-owned apps from operating in the country. The reason given was that the apps were prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the defence of India, and the security of state and public order.

• Alipay, Shein, TikTok and various e-commerce apps were among those banned.

• This left space for domestic players to flourish — including UPI3 payment apps such as PhonePe and Paytm, as well as local e-commerce companies such as Myntra.

• India's digital payments ecosystem, now insulated from Chinese tech, has become one of the world's largest.

There are plenty of other such examples. Almost every country is increasingly thinking of fintech and payments in terms of national interest. Regulation is increasingly shaped by geopolitical concerns. Market stability and consumer protection will always be important to regulators, but policymakers are acutely aware that financial flows can be impacted by events happening in faraway lands. 

Case in point. A recent Bank of England paper found that “heightened geopolitical risk is negatively associated with a number of measures of bank stability such as non-performing loans and return on assets”. If central banks are paying attention, so should we. The schisms in trade, diplomacy, and trust can impact even our digital payment rails. What follows is an exploration of two areas where geopolitics and fintech come together: chokepoints, and resilience.

Note: It's worth making clear that geopolitics is not about picking a side, or expressing political views. Geopolitics is about reality, not polemics. It's about seeing the world as it really is, not as you would like it to be. This means understanding why states and organisations act the way they do, even when those actions may be personally objectionable. Geopolitical analysis seeks to understand, not to judge.

Chokepoints

Fintech arose through innovation and disrupting legacy tech. We’re at a stage where data can move, in a flash, across borders and systems. But the legacy rails remain, and the control of networks is a form of power. Scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman explain:

Global economic networks have become a key terrain of geopolitical competition.

States that control central nodes in these networks can exploit asymmetries of interdependence to coerce other states.

For many decades the US has been the most substantial and consequential node in financial infrastructure. If you want to move dollars from one part of the world to another, even if it’s from Latin America to Asia, the transfer will likely go via US correspondent banks.

Author and former diplomat Edward Fishman explains in the video below that the dollar itself is the most important chokepoint, and pre-eminent currency across all use cases of money throughout the global economy. As a unit of account, as a store of value, and as a means of exchange4 — the dollar reigns supreme. Most banks, wherever they are in the world, primarily hold two currencies: their domestic currency and US dollars.

At an institutional level, central banks keep around 60% of their currency reserves in dollars, with the euro in second place at around 20%, and China’s RMB at 5% or below. Dollar dominance has meant the US has been able to wage economic warfare in a way that no other country can. Examples of countries hardest hit by economic sanctions include Cuba, Iraq under Saddam, Iran, and North Korea.

Yet working outside of the US dollar system is hard. But not impossible.

While there's often discussion of how transactions on blockchains can be tracked, enforcement is another matter. Without US-controlled chokepoints, sanctioned states have found ways to move value and garner digital dollars. Analytics firm Elliptic recently identified that Iran has acquired at least half a billion dollars of stablecoins, and this may be the tip of the iceberg — Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex allows users to store USDT. OFAC5, the US government agency that administers sanctions, isn’t going to go after ordinary Iranians, but those who deal with sanctioned exchanges outside the country will find themselves at risk of enforcement. Another heavily sanctioned state, North Korea, reportedly hacked $1.3bn in cryptocurrency in 2025, which passed through the USDT stablecoin on the Tron blockchain.

The irony is that countries barred from dealing in dollars in the real world have found ways to send and receive dollars on-chain. The goal is to keep it clandestine, but the activity is often visible. The chokepoints may be slowly losing their grip.6

Beyond evasion, other structural changes are taking place. The development of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) is one force that could gradually erode dollar dominance. If countries can trade directly with each other electronically, the need for correspondent banks to facilitate trade in dollars will diminish over time. This is something that Ross Buckley has explored at length.

Resilience

As the global order discombobulates, we face additional risk. If chokepoints create vulnerability, then the response is to build resilience. This isn't only about dollar dominance, because in reality, every system has its chokepoints.7

The question to ask: what if the infrastructure we take for granted suddenly goes kaput? Some countries8 and companies are ahead of the curve, planning for worst-case scenarios, while others are gradually waking up and finally prioritising resilience.

In October last year, American banking giant JPMorganChase announced a $1.5trn Security and Resiliency Initiative. As part of the initiative, the bank will invest up to $10bn in select American companies. It comes with an impressive external advisory board including Jeff Bezos, Condoleezza Rice, and Michael Dell. Complementing this is the firm’s Center for Geopolitics, set up to provide clients with insights into the latest global trends. 

While the scale of JPMorganChase’s activities stand out, geopolitical analysts such as Velina Tchakarova mention consulting with asset managers and other organisations to help business leaders manage through uncertain times. In 2026 we can expect executives to lean more on independent geopolitics experts for guidance.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) chief economist Philip Lane believes that Europe’s reliance on American payment companies leaves it open to economic coercion:

We are witnessing a global shift towards a more multipolar monetary system, with payments systems and currencies increasingly wielded as instruments of geopolitical influence.

Such sentiments would have seemed far-fetched a decade ago. Although today, after many decades of reliance on the US, Europe is finally on a path to self-reliance in the military domain. Many want payments to follow the same path. At an institutional level the ECB is pursuing its own digital currency, but this is not scheduled to go live until 2029. In some markets, Wero — an account-to-account payment system that sees strengthening European sovereignty as one of its key objectives — is growing in popularity.

Asia is far down this path. Central banks and national payment authorities in countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and India have developed payment systems that bypass card networks. Paying via a QR code, whether from a banking app or from within a super-app such as Indonesia’s Gojek, has become the norm across much of the region.

But a successful domestic payment system in itself isn’t enough — the next important step is interoperability. One of my key trends to watch in 2026: Asia’s interlocking mobile wallets. Asia is the most advanced region when it comes to building connectivity across domestic national payment systems. Chinese travellers can pay with their domestic payment apps, such as Alipay, when travelling in Thailand. Indonesia’s central bank is implementing cross-border payments for the QRIS scheme in China and South Korea. Even Hong Kong’s Octopus mobile wallet can be used in Japan via the popular PayPay system.

End note

Fintech is often synonymous with innovation.

Whether you’re accepting payments while running a shop in a favela in Rio or taking an Uber in Bangkok, such innovations have made our lives easier. But resilience and sovereignty are growing in importance too. Companies and countries want to ensure that whatever happens, their payment rails stay connected. Those who succeed will continue innovating while understanding that the ground is always shifting beneath their feet. This is a complex topic with many strands to unpick. Think of this essay as an introduction to how geopolitics is making fintech messier. Welcome to 2026.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture!

The meshing together of money, tech and geopolitics is one of my favourite topics so I really enjoyed writing this one. If you made it this far I assume you found it interesting too! 👾

Please leave a comment or share with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. It’s much appreciated and helps grow the audience of this newsletter.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

The Ipsos twice-yearly ranking asks customers how likely they'd be to recommend their bank to friends or family. In the latest results, Monzo scored 82%, with Chase and Starling Bank joint second at 78%. Since 2020, Monzo has led or come joint top almost every time. They also topped the latest YouGov customer satisfaction survey.

Revolut’s first market was the UK, and it’s still Revolut’s biggest, with more than 10 million customers, so you may be wondering: why isn’t Revolut included in these banking satisfaction surveys?

While Revolut has been approved for a UK banking licence, it’s still in the “mobilisation phase”, which means it doesn’t yet have a full banking licence, and therefore is not eligible for these surveys. Part of Revolut’s challenge is that while their international growth has been phenomenal, it has made UK regulators nervous.

Any bank dealing with tens of millions of customers will need to demonstrate they can scale their risk management infrastructure accordingly. It’s a unique situation as most UK banks focus on their home market rather than expanding globally, especially before securing their UK licence.

Since I last wrote about Monzo, a lot has happened, and its future direction makes it one of the most interesting stories to watch this year. The bank has been a huge success in the UK. Now, after ten years of focusing on the UK, the bank is stretching into other markets, and its strategy is evolving faster than ever. All this while major leadership changes are happening at the top.

In this series, I’m going to review the state of Monzo, as it stands at the start of 2026.

The story will unfold in three parts:

• The marketing magic ✨

• The strategy 📖

• The leadership clash ✊🏻

Note: The subsequent posts covering Monzo’s strategy and leadership will follow in the next weeks. Though they will not come immediately after this one, as I’m going to break it up with some other posts in between. Be sure to subscribe not to miss the full series.

Welcome to Payments Culture!

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

Make sure to subscribe, and let’s connect on LinkedIn and on X.

Monzo’s Marketing Magic ✨

At the end of last summer I wrote about my experience at Monzo’s book pop-up.

The event lasted for two days, and it’d be wrong to call it a store. There was nothing to buy as the books were free. The only catch was waiting in line for an hour to get one (luckily it was early September, and not the middle of Winter!). 

As well as a free copy of the book of money, I also got a chocolate bar, a notebook, and a £20 book token. Not bad at all.

One of the key messages in my write up of the book pop-up was that almost all other banks would struggle to approve such a marketing strategy. This experiential marketing approach is not something that can be easily measured in terms of ROI. 

However, it does reflect Monzo’s approach of creating fans. You can call them customers or users, but if you actually create fans then this will cascade.

While only a few thousand lined up to get their free book and chocolate bar, countless more saw and shared the campaign on social media.

The bank has long positioned itself differently to legacy banks. Lacking the deep pockets of the established banks, Monzo had to build a sense of community and connection to gain a foothold. This approach is now set in Monzo’s DNA and continues in many ways.

Monzo’s Sponsorship of Coventry City FC

These days, football teams in some parts of the world are franchises that get created seemingly out of thin air (think Inter Miami). But the origins of most football teams in the UK are in the local community. Many were founded by working-class men who spent six days a week in coal mines or factories, then spent their one day off each week playing football. From their hobby emerged the teams we know and love today.

These origins are why football teams in England are usually based in working-class neighbourhoods. Industrial towns such as Burnley and Blackburn in the North of England have long-standing and very successful teams given their population size.

Monzo have been the shirt sponsor of Coventry City FC since the start of last season. Coventry is not a glamorous club. They are not in the Premier League. They are not based in London. Coventry is a small city in the Midlands around 20 miles from Birmingham. However, they are a good match for Monzo.

Frank Lampard, former Chelsea and England captain, manages Coventry City, who currently sit top of the Championship (England’s second-tier league). There’s a good chance they’ll be a Premier League team next season. If they get promoted, it’ll be the first time the team has made it to England’s top league since the 2000-2001 season.

Likewise, Monzo is also on a journey from underdog to champion. Despite having millions of customers, the bank is often still referred to as a challenger bank. There’s still a long way to go in attracting customer deposits at a similar level to the big legacy banks, and there’s considerable room to expand their product suite.

From a financial perspective sponsoring a Championship team makes sense:

• Sponsoring a Premier League team can cost upwards of £50m per annum.

• Sponsoring a Championship team can cost £5m per annum (perhaps less).

The benefit of sponsoring a Premier League team is the global reach that you get from TV viewership and social media. But for Monzo this isn’t so important right now - their focus remains the UK market. In addition, working with a smaller team allows Monzo greater scope and creativity when building that sense of community, which is important to their own ethos and to football fans, including those of Coventry City.

If Coventry City win promotion, Monzo may find itself sponsoring a Premier League team. But this past weekend brought its own excitement. There was a mini-frenzy in the city. Coventry City football shirts were for sale for 1p. The shirt on offer was Coventry City’s away kit, which is in Monzo’s trademark hot coral colour. The only requirement was to have a Monzo account and to pay the 1p with your Monzo card.

The BBC reported:

Coventry City fans were able to purchase a coral away shirt at two pop-up shops. By mid-morning there was an expected wait time of more than three hours at the city centre stand.

The company offered the shirts at the CBS Arena and Broadgate Square ahead of the Sky Blues match against Leicester City at the CBS arena.

Fans were queuing for more than hour before the Broadgate pop-up shop, run by online bank Monzo, opened. Some fans on social media joked they would still be in the queue when the match kicked off at midday

On the club’s website, Vuokko Aro, Monzo’s Chief Design Officer emphasised the community aspect, and how Monzo’s motto fits with the moment:

We know how much the kit means to Coventry fans, so we wanted to do something special to kick off the year. For one day only, we’re covering the cost so fans can get their hands on it for just 1p. It’s a simple way to show our support for the club and the community, and a reminder of what we stand for at Monzo: making money work for everyone.

As expected, many fans were keen on getting a football shirt for a penny, especially as the adult sizes can cost up to £80. Behind the 1p shirts was a logic that Monzo fans would understand. It wasn’t a coincidence that the shirts were sold for a penny and not for a pound. It all links back to one of Monzo’s most successful annual marketing campaigns.

Making Saving and Switching Easy and Fun

At the start of each year Monzo publicises the 1p Saving Challenge. The idea is simple. Users save 1p on the first day of the year, 2p on the second day of the year, 3p on the third and so on. If a customer signs up on January 1st and continues throughout the year, after the addition of £3.65 on the last day of the year, they’ll have saved a total of £667.95 (before any interest).

The end result may not seem substantial, but the goal of the 1p Saving Challenge is to encourage those who may not have a strong habit of saving money to get used to putting the pennies away. The challenge shows that by even starting small, savings can add up, and encourage the saving habit to grow.

In announcing the 1p football shirt offer Coventry City linked the promotion back to Monzo’s ambition of making money work for everyone. And a key part of this mantra is building sustainable savings habits:

Why 1p? Because pennies add up. Monzo is kickstarting long lasting saving habits and fronting the cost of the shirt to show just how much impact a single penny can have - and how easy it is to turn small daily savings into something big.

The concept of a year-long daily savings challenge existed before Monzo productised it.

It was often discussed on the popular personal finance website Money Saving Expert, and in various Reddit groups. But the Monzo magic was in automating the user experience. Once enrolled, the daily savings goal is automatically moved from a user's current account to a savings pot each day — no manual transfers required.

Deepening customer engagement

As well as those looking to enhance their savings habits interest in the 1p Saving Challenge this year has been spurred by Monzo’s use of gamification, or what I’m calling lotto-isation. Let me explain. In joining the 1p Saving Challenge before the end of January, Monzo customers are eligible to win £10k in a prize draw provided they complete 365 days of daily saving. Additionally those with paid accounts have the chance to win £100, with 100 prizes on offer each month.

This isn’t the first time that Monzo has taken this approach of rewarding customers with a giveaway. Double Payday was launched at the end of last year and generated lots of publicity for the bank. There are still many customers who use Monzo — and other neobanks — as their second bank, such as for tracking expenses, when spending money abroad, or to make payments easily. Double Payday is a way to nudge customers to pay their salary into Monzo, and to use it as their main bank account.

Billsback works similarly but targets recurring payments. Each month, Monzo refunds around 1,000 customer bills in full (up to £150 each). Everything from Netflix to utility bills is in scope provided your Monzo debit card is used for payment. It’s a direct financial incentive for users to move regular payments across to Monzo, and those who do so will likely make Monzo their primary account.

Traditional banks have long offered switching bonuses, for instance rewarding consumers with a one-off payment for moving across their main account, usually on the proviso that they pay in a minimum salary and set up some direct debits. Some users game the system by cycling through banks to collect multiple bonuses.

Monzo’s approach is different. Customers are offered many ways and incentives to ramp up engagement. It’s not just about signing up for an account (though you do get £10 for referring a friend). Rather, ongoing lottery-style rewards deepen engagement and interaction with the bank. This is where marketing and strategy come together, and Monzo’s strategy will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture. I appreciate it!

Please leave a comment or share with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. It’s much appreciated and helps grow the audience of this newsletter.

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This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

I’m currently looking for new opportunities. I’m open to short-term assignments as well as permanent positions. You can email me or contact me on LinkedIn to discuss further.

Thank you for reading this Substack. It’s really appreciated.

When you first start writing a newsletter like this one, the first months often feel like writing into the void. Unless you bring a large audience from another platform, with any new Substack, at first, the only readers are friends, family, and some industry contacts. A couple of years later, it’s rewarding to have built up a few thousand subscribers, many of whom provide valuable feedback and share my writing within their network.

I decided not to do a typical look-back-on-the-industry type post at the end of last year. Yet, now looking back, with 2025 over and done, it was useful for me to assess which content performed well and proved most popular, and why certain topics in particular resonated with my readers.

In 2025, I published 24 unique posts on Payments Culture, amounting to over 60,000 words. The quietest month was January, with only a single post, whereas June and October both saw four posts. My goal is to publish 3-4 times a month, yet given that some posts in 2025 were quite lengthy, I am happy with the level of output.

The five most read posts covered a variety of topics, with posts on specific companies doing the best, but as you’d expect, topics like stablecoins and Apple Pay also proved popular. Here are the top five in descending order:

1. Can Revolut Compete With American Express? (published in July)

I remember finishing this post when travelling to Money 2020 in Amsterdam. I was typing away, hunched in the waiting area of London St Pancras station, sipping my coffee, waiting to board my Eurostar train. I finished proofreading when I got to my hotel and hit publish right before I hit the sack. I had a feeling this one would be prove to be popular. But I was surprised it was the most read of the year.

The idea for this post came when I read in Sifted that Revolut was building a rewards credit card. Due to regulations and caps on interchange fees in the UK and Europe, it’s not possible for a Visa or Mastercard card to compete with American Express. In the post I explain this dynamic, and it made for an intriguing explainer.

As well as being my most-read and most-shared post, it was also the post that attracted the largest number of new subscribers. This was partly because I posted a version on LinkedIn, which drove new subscribers to Substack. Posting duplicates of Substack posts on LinkedIn is a double-edged sword. It’s a reality that LinkedIn is the main platform for many fintech aficionados, and many prefer to stay on the platform rather than reading long-form posts on Substack. But the risk is that readers get used to reading content on LinkedIn when my goal is to grow my readership primarily on Substack. This is something I’m going to continue experimenting with.

2. Why Ryanair Wants You to Pay by Bank (published in September)

Writing about Open Banking often proves to be popular. My most popular posts of 2024 were on the topic of Open Banking so I’m not surprised to see that this one also did well. The popularity mainly stems from readers in the UK and US, where Open Banking hasn’t taken off as expected, and many are curious whether any new developments might finally unlock mainstream adoption. At the same time, readers in markets such as Brazil, India, and even in Southeast Asia are amazed that account-to-account payments are still such a rarity in the West, where cards, for better or for worse, still run the show.

My interest in this particular angle came about when I saw Pay by Bank as an option at the checkout when booking flights with Ryanair. Paying directly from a bank account instead of via card is something that’s great for airlines. It means cheaper fees, no chargebacks, and merchants will receive settlement immediately rather than in subsequent days. In my post I estimated that Ryanair would save at least £3 million per annum if they converted only a small proportion of payments from cards to Pay by Bank. And this is only considering the transaction fee element, let alone savings from avoiding chargeback fees and other operational costs.

To nudge consumers to try Pay by Bank Ryanair and their Open Banking provider, True Layer, put in place a 5% cashback incentive — capped at £10 per transaction — for a limited time period. Although such an incentive is costly, it may change user behaviour at the margins, and changes to the checkout UX may also play a part, as Pay by Bank is shown as the default payment option.

3. Did Curve Force Visa and Mastercard to Innovate? (published in December)

In what was my longest post of the year at over 5,000 words, I looked at the impact of Curve on the payments industry, a story which had unfolded over many years. Originally, due to compliance reasons, Curve struggled to get their partnership with Mastercard off the ground. Yet some years later the company had millions of customers and while Curve’s exact business model had its flaws, similar products have since been launched by both Visa and Mastercard. The idea of switching between payment options from a single source clearly inspired both card companies.

Lloyds Banking Group acquired Curve in November. This acquisition had been on the cards for some months, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to Curve in the months ahead — will it continue to exist as a standalone company? Or get absorbed into the Lloyds Banking Group ecosystem?

4. Stablecoins Have Had a Rocket Boost (published in March)

This post acted as a bare-bones stablecoin explainer and an overview of key industry dynamics at the time, such as Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge. Before writing, I noticed that much of the content available captured the stablecoin hype but didn’t explain the basics or the implications for legacy payment providers. I watched various interviews, spoke with others in the industry, and brought together my own view on stablecoins. The GENIUS Act passed in the months that followed, and 2025 saw stablecoin mania — especially in the US — something which looks set to continue in 2026.

5. Eleven Ways That Apple Pay Changed Payments

   Part 1 (published in October)

   Part 2 (published in November)

This topic had been pending on my to-do list for over a year. I missed the ten-year anniversary of Apple Pay and then put it on hold, returning to it this autumn around the eleven-year mark. The content got too long, so I split it into two parts, with part 1 covering items 1-5, and part 2 covering items 6-11.

The Apple Pay story got bigger the more I examined it. On the surface it’s a means of making a contactless payment, but over time, the wider ecosystem and additional features have made it invaluable. It’s the preferred payment option for many in the UK, not just in stores, but when using the Tube or buses. Apple Wallet now incorporates Digital ID (US only for now), and virtual cards let digital banks onboard customers immediately, eliminating the need to wait days or weeks for a physical card to arrive.

In the next edition: What I’m watching in fintech in 2026

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After decades of sky-high inflation, it’s become a necessity. And while Americans complained about the price of eggs doubling in 2024, Argentinians have dealt with an average inflation rate of 204% since 2015. So with the Argentine Peso losing value like it’s going out of fashion, it’s no surprise that crypto is widely used in the country as a store of value.

In Argentina, crypto apps are popular not only as a means of buying Bitcoin, but also to acquire digital dollars (stablecoins). And those living outside the country use crypto apps to send money back home.

The Community Comes Together

At the end of November, the Ethereum community hosted its flagship event, DevConnect Week, in Buenos Aires. The gathering brought together crypto enthusiasts from around the world to experience Argentina’s crypto innovation firsthand.

While the Ethereum community was in town, another event — WalletCon— also took place in Buenos Aires. This event brought together WalletConnect partners, including developers, infrastructure builders, and wallet providers.

Founded in 2018, WalletConnect began as a protocol enabling crypto wallets to communicate with crypto apps.1 It links more than 700 wallets with over 80,000 applications for more than 52.5 million end users. The network is on track to support a payment volume of more than $400 billion in 2025. This surpasses Square’s 2024 volume of $241 billion, and Checkout.com’s anticipated $300 billion of processing volume this year.2

WalletConnect had recently launched WalletConnect Pay, and was showcasing the solution at WalletCon. In Buenos Aires, attendees could use it to buy WalletConnect merchandise on payment terminals throughout the event. It was a culmination of more than a year’s work.

Protocol to Payment Product

Not long after WalletCon, I spoke with Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect, to learn more about WalletConnect Pay and how payment processors can add comprehensive crypto acceptance to their payments stack in days rather than months.

Jess told me that prior to WalletConnect Pay, “our technology wasn’t specifically designed for payments, and those companies [launching crypto payments] had to stitch together a whole bunch of other stuff at the back end in order to provide a clean end-to-end flow.”

Now with WalletConnect Pay, the company provides not only the wallet connectivity, but the settlement infrastructure and risk management tools. Payment providers can accept payments from all wallets connected to the WalletConnect ecosystem and receive settlement in a variety of crypto assets, including stablecoins, or even fiat currency, if they so wish.

Jess started building in the crypto space in the late 2010s, and more recently gained experience building in a traditional fintech environment, working as Chief of Staff, and then Head of Crypto Strategy at fintech unicorn Checkout.com. Now, as CEO of WalletConnect, Jess noted “I sit between the two [traditional payments and crypto] and we get to build the standards with the industry, and help bring everyone closer together.”

Enabling PSPs to Accept Crypto

WalletConnect’s goal isn’t to sell directly to merchants, but to partner with PSPs, enabling them to integrate crypto payment acceptance alongside cards, and mobile wallets such as Apple Pay.

This reminds me how payment gateways evolved ten years ago. Back then, card payments and PayPal were table stakes, but integrations into local payment methods could be done in one of two ways.

Either payment gateways could build their own integrations into local payment methods, or they could work with an orchestration platform such as PPRO to gain access to a wide range of local payment options through a single integration. As an equivalent, WalletConnect Pay acts as that aggregation platform for crypto wallets.

For PSPs, this unlocks a valuable customer segment. There’s substantial wealth held in crypto, and customers are looking to spend it. This is particularly attractive to those purchasing luxury products such as Ferraris and Malibu seaside homes. If you need to settle a $25,000 tab at a Buenos Aires nightclub, crypto can come in handy — for transaction values this eye-watering, credit cards can struggle to work their magic.

Managing Risk For PSPs

Usually, the upper limit of any single payment transaction is restricted. Card issuers set a limit based on the available credit line, and card acquirers may have a maximum transaction value hard-coded into their systems. Even with open banking, each bank sets its ceiling based on its risk tolerance, and any payment over this threshold requires prior authorisation.

Crypto payments solve for some of the constraints of card payments, but they present a different challenge — there is no upper transaction limit.

Crypto wealth can be easily spent, but PSPs still need to be cautious of money laundering and other compliance risks. Jess explained that WalletConnect Pay offers PSPs control, “WalletConnect offers a modular solution. The PSP can impose their own limits. The goal here is not to get around laws and regulations that payment companies need to follow. Each PSP manages their own compliance—we give them infrastructure flexible enough to meet whatever requirements they face.”

As demonstrated at WalletCon, WalletConnect Pay can operate both on a point of sale device, as well as in an ecommerce environment. In-person payments currently rely on QR codes, which are a common user experience in Southeast Asia, India and Brazil, but less so in the US, UK and Europe. In these markets, the simplicity of contactless payments and especially Apple Pay and Google Pay are more common.

Closing the UX Gap

Jess acknowledged that the user experience for crypto payments can be improved. “A crypto payment, even though it works today, is still a worse experience, typically, than tapping my Apple pay. I take my phone out. Done. There’s more intensive action today required for a crypto payment.” In 2026, this will be something to watch — can crypto payments become as easy to use and familiar as card payments?

WalletConnect has an ambitious road map. A recent White Paper outlines plans to optimise the checkout experience and integrate with other QR-based systems. The goal is for a world in which “PSPs can operate a dual-rail future where card and crypto acceptance coexist seamlessly” and merchants “gain lower fees, direct crypto settlement, and fraud protection without sacrificing existing operational standards.”

Heading into 2026, WalletConnect Pay offers PSPs a practical option — one integration connecting millions of end users, with settlement in crypto or fiat.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture!

Special thanks to Jess Houlgrave at WalletConnect for the discussion.

If you are a fintech company and want to share your story please reach out and let’s talk further. You can contact me via email, on LinkedIn, or on X.

Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

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This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world, and why it matters.

Curve has been on quite a journey. It was founded by Shachar Bialick in 2015, and last week, after much speculation, Lloyds Banking Group1 announced the acquisition of Curve. The price is reported to be £120m (approximately US $165m). But the impact of Curve goes well beyond the relatively modest acquisition price.2

The fintech had grand ambitions from the get-go — to be the access point to “everything money” — yet in an early meeting the challenge was made clear. In that meeting, Mastercard reportedly laughed Shachar Bialick “out of the room.”3 Based on Mastercard’s rulebook, what Curve wanted to do wasn’t feasible. It wasn’t compliant. But like all successful startups, Curve’s vision shone through, they got up and running, and the rest is history.

If we are successful in our mission with Curve, you will still have Revolut, Amex, Monzo, and all those great fintech and financial institutions out there. It’s just that with Curve, we’re going to be this access point to your gateway to everything money. It’s going to be one place from which you access everything, exactly like with Spotify [and music].

Curve Founder, Shachar Bialick, talking on the Secret Leaders podcast earlier this year.

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Curve has been one of the most interesting fintech startups of the past decade. The company’s impact has been broader than the UK market alone. What Curve built has had a global impact, and to understand the full picture a number of key questions need answering.

• What did Curve build, and how did it work?

• Was Curve’s approach a threat to Visa and Mastercard?

• What is unique about the card schemes’ business models?

• How did Visa and Mastercard innovate in response to Curve?

As a follow up, in a future edition of this newsletter, I’ll ask the question: Why did Lloyds Banking Group buy Curve? The answer will build on some of the key themes and discussion points from this essay, with additional insights on bank-level strategy.

Why Subscribe to Payments Culture?

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• Some weeks, I’ll add additional content including personal essays, case studies, and interviews with fintech leaders.

• Paid subscribers get at least 1x additional essay(s) per month, access to the full archive, and more features currently under development.

The long-form analysis found in this newsletter is not sponsored. I rely on readers for their support to keep writing. My next essay — out in the coming week — will be for paid members only. If you are able to support my writing it’s much appreciated.

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Understanding Curve’s Business Model

Curve’s business model is simple: users can combine all their credit and debit cards into a single card and one interface.

Users download the Curve app and add their existing non-Curve cards to their Curve account. Each time a card is added, users authenticate through their respective banking or credit card app. Prior to any payment transaction, users select their preferred card in their Curve app, which acts as the pass-through card for any subsequent transactions until the pass-through card is changed in-app.

Curve isn’t linked to a bank account or a direct funding source, but to the various cards added in the Curve app. When you pay with your Curve card, Curve fronts the transaction and pushes it through to the underlying card you’ve selected as the funding source.

Consider how this model impacts a standard card payment transaction flow.

A transaction originates when a cardholder pays a merchant. What follows is the settlement of interchange and scheme fees to the card scheme4, and the cardholder gets debited for the transaction, with the merchant receiving funds net of any fees.

With a Curve transaction, the transaction flow differs.

From a cardholder perspective, it seems like there’s an additional step where the Curve card sends the transaction to the underlying card issuer.

However, the above diagram is actually wrong ❌

What’s taking place are two unique transactions. From a cardholder perspective it seems like a single transaction, but there are two legs. In order for Curve’s pass-through model to operate, two unique transactions take place almost instantaneously.

Leg 1 is what’s known as a Customer Initiated Transaction (CIT).

• A CIT seems like a normal transaction initiated either in-store or online

• But in this leg Curve fronts the transaction

• This transaction is subject to Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) rules5

• The merchant’s acquirer processes the transaction

• And Curve — or their issuing partner — is the card issuer

• The Curve app will show the full merchant name

Leg 2 is what’s known as a Merchant Initiated Transaction (MIT).

• The cardholder doesn’t see the MIT taking place

• In this leg, Curve is the Merchant of Record (MoR)

• This transaction doesn’t need cardholder authorisation, as the cardholder provided their permission to Curve to initiate such transactions when they added their card(s) to the app6

• Curve’s acquirer processes the transaction

• The issuer is the underlying card company or bank selected in the Curve app

• The cardholder statement will show something like CRV*STARBUCKS

For card issuers, the downside of Curve’s model is that when Curve is used, they don’t get the level of information they expect, and are used to getting from each transaction. They know it’s a Curve transaction, but they don’t get merchant location detail, and even the full merchant name may not flow through. This lack of merchant-level information makes it hard for banks to detect fraud patterns and build customer profiles. On the other hand, Curve knows where you shop and how much you spend across the various cards connected to their app.

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From a revenue perspective, Curve gains interchange revenue on Leg 1. In the UK and EU, this is 0.20% on debit card and 0.30% on credit card transactions.7 However, on Leg 2, Curve loses money. They have to pay the full set of acquiring fees as well as other related fees, such as any payment gateway costs. Additionally, if Leg 2 fails, Curve may retry the transaction, but if ultimately the transaction is unsuccessful, then Curve may bear a loss equal to the full transaction amount.

These factors mean that, structurally speaking, on a transaction-by-transaction basis, Curve’s business model is loss-making.8 The transaction economics mean that even if revenue per user rises through increasing interchange income, it won’t close the gap between top-line growth and profitability. To combat this, Curve expanded into adjacent areas and launched additional product lines away from this discrepancy between interchange income (Leg 1) and total fees (Leg 2).

Curve’s Other Revenue Drivers

In the last available financial results9 — which are for the full year 2023 — after interchange income (£14.6m), Curve’s biggest revenue line was subscription income (£7.2m), and then platform income (£4.9m).

Platform income came from several sources. Retailers paid fees to be featured as cashback partners in the Curve app. Companies such as Samsung and Huawei used Curve’s technology as the mobile payments layer on some of their devices. And the platform income line also included FX fees, ATM fees, and revenue from Curve Flex — an instalment payment product.

Moving on to subscription income. This has become a mainstay of the fintech business model. Monzo, Revolut, and now even Klarna offer paid subscription plans. The consumer pays a monthly fee for a membership tier that offers benefits such as travel insurance, airport lounge access, and various company-specific benefits. In theory, the package that comes with any monthly membership should be good value for consumers yet profitable for the fintech.

Most importantly, the consumers who are happy to pay a monthly fee are likely to be the most engaged customers and use the product more than free users.10 Although for Curve, the challenge is that given the mismatch between Legs 1 and 2, a more engaged customer could, in some cases, equate to a less profitable customer.

Curve has paid plans at £5.99, £9.99, and the most expensive paid plan comes in at £17.99 a month — the top plan offers features such as “Unlimited past payment transfers from one card to another for 120 days” and “£100,000 fee-free spending abroad”. Some of the monthly fees are steep, yet Curve generated almost 50% of their interchange income from subscription revenue.

On closer analysis, the subscriptions numbers are not so impressive. If we take the £7.2m subscription income and assume an average monthly subscription of £10, this equates to around 60,000 paying subscribers. Given this £7.2m is from data which ends in 2023 (per the last available annual report), even being generous in future revenue assumptions means that less than 1.5%11 of the reported 6m user base12 have paid accounts.

Monzo is an interesting counterpoint. It is a company that has a more engaged customer base than Curve. Even though one is a bank and one is an all-in-one card — it’s not a like-for-like comparison — still, with around 1m paid subscriptions across their user base of more than 12m, Monzo has a paid subscriber ratio of 8%.13 The quantum of the difference illustrates the extent to which Curve has struggled to convert its customer base to paid subscriptions, while Monzo has been hugely successful.

There have been other examples of where Curve struggled with user engagement. Back in 2019, information leaked revealing that of Curve’s 500,000 customers only 14% were Monthly Active Users (MAU). This gave credence to the view that some had long held about Curve. It was an app many users downloaded to test and try, but they rarely stuck with it. They didn’t see the benefit. This was especially the case in markets like the UK, where the popularity of Apple Pay meant that users already had a de facto mobile wallet that held all their cards.

Curve had to work hard to stay relevant, while consistently innovating and seeking to grow their user base, all while trying to close the gap between revenue and profitability. The company made cumulative losses of at least £140m before acquisition.14 However, they still undoubtedly had a substantial impact, and to understand this significance, we need to get into the skin of how the card scheme giants operate.

Curve vs Visa and Mastercard (and Amex)

Curve has developed a unique and innovative business model that relies on access to payment networks and is subject to their rules. Payment networks could adopt new operating rules, or reinterpret existing rules, which would hamper Curve’s business model.

Curve’s annual report for the financial year ending 31st December 202315 highlighted a key risk to the business model. If the payment networks changed their rules then Curve would struggle. Their innovative business model was dependent on the card network’s support.

Initially, Curve founder Shachar Bialick struggled to get up and running. He’d built a prototype with £1.2m of seed funding, but in order to launch, he needed one of the two main card networks — Visa or Mastercard — to approve his business idea.

Once one was onboard, he knew the solution could be used at every merchant location that accepted Visa or Mastercard. The opposite scenario, if he couldn’t win over one of the two card giants, would be signing up merchants and partners directly, something which would be time-consuming and resource-intensive. But with one of the large networks on board, he could short-circuit the acceptance side. However, achieving this was tough.

Mastercard were not initially supportive with Curve’s approach, but after much wrangling, they permitted a pilot of Curve in 2016 before a full public launch in 2018.

Mastercard were initially sceptical as Curve changed core aspects of the card payments model. For instance, the fact that the card presented for payment isn’t the ultimate funding source for a transaction was a big change. And some of Curve’s features, such as Go Back in Time16, allowed users to change the funding source up to 120 days after the initial transaction, was something that hadn’t been seen before. In many respects, Curve’s product offering sat in a compliance grey area — it was a solution that didn’t fit within existing business models, such as that of card issuing, processing, or programme manager.17

Although, it was always like that either Visa or Mastercard would agree to work with Curve. If the concept was a success, there was plenty of upside in terms of additional transaction revenue, especially since there would be two sets of scheme fees18 for every normal transaction. Additionally, while Curve did pose a challenge for the card schemes’ existing rulebooks, regulations such as PSD219 led to more open competition.20

Crucially, the regulation confirmed that Merchant Initiated Transactions (MIT) would not be subject to the same customer authentication rules as Customer Initiated Transactions (CIT). Therefore, Leg 2 in Curve’s business model could remain friction-free, provided the underlying card had been authorised by the cardholder when loading into the Curve app.

At this point it’s worth noting Curve’s travails with American Express (Amex).

Initially, one reason many UK consumers got excited about Curve was that it supported Amex cards. While the situation has gradually improved over time, fewer businesses accept Amex cards than Visa or Mastercard cards. This is due to cost. Amex nearly always has higher fees than Visa and Mastercard, which means some retailers refuse to accept Amex.21 Retailers can take this stance as every cardholder will always have at least one other card in their wallet (or Apple Wallet) that they can use if Amex is not offered as a payment option.

Consumers were happy that via Curve they’d now be able to use Amex everywhere. To retailers the card would appear as a Mastercard transaction (Leg 1). Leg 2 would operate differently for Amex than for other card brands, as Amex operates a closed-loop network in which it is both the card issuer and the acquirer.

As Curve’s UK volumes grew, Amex was frustrated by the lack of data and the general operating model of Curve. Amex has strict acceptance criteria and sees its offering as a premium brand. For Amex, they want to stay front and centre — and not just act as a funding source. Amex blocked Curve after a few months in 2016, and while they relaunched Amex support with a different model22 in 2019, this didn’t last long either.23

Competitive and Business Model Dynamics

Curve’s relationship with Visa and Mastercard has been one of coopetition. Curve needed the card schemes for reach, but the ultimate business model conflicted. To understand this conflict in more detail, we need to understand the differences in the respective business models. Curve sought to offer their users payment choice from one connection point. But the card schemes have a business model that is dependent on deep and enduring relationships with their issuing bank partners.

Coopetitive relationships are complex as they consist of two diametrically different logics of interaction. Actors involved in coopetition are involved in a relationship that on the one hand consists of hostility due to conflicting interests and on the other hand consists of friendliness due to common interests.

From a paper by Bengtsson and Kock, who popularised the concept of coopetition — a relationship in which firms cooperate and compete with each other at the same time.24

Visa and Mastercard’s core customers are, and always have been, issuing banks.25

Their networks facilitate card payments globally, and banks know their customers can spend in almost every country in the world, provided their cards have either a Visa or Mastercard badge. The companies have diversified into other products in recent years, including payment gateway solutions, fraud prevention, and more recently, stablecoin offerings. Yet the vast majority of card scheme revenue still comes from card issuing relationships.

In the 1960s, neither card scheme had more than tens of bank partners and all partner banks were located in the US. Today, there are thousands of financial institutions, located in 200+ countries and territories, that work with Visa and/or Mastercard.

Within Visa and Mastercard, every bank has an account manager. For large institutions, the relationship can be intensive—entire teams work with these major banks day-to-day to optimise card programmes, launch new products, and grow their business together. Some of the world’s largest issuers may have ten or more dedicated Visa or Mastercard staff involved day to day in their partnership. In return, these banks generate enormous revenue for the card schemes. As you would expect, the precise numbers behind any particular partnership aren’t disclosed, but with both networks earning a small fee on every transaction, there are many issuers generating tens of millions of pounds in card scheme fees annually.

So if we consider that Visa and Mastercard both benefit from deep long-term relationships with their issuing bank partners, then Curve differs. Its business model isn’t concerned with depth of issuing bank relationships. Rather, the ability to switch between issuing banks is the central aspect of Curve’s model.

Curve’s customers are its users — those who log into their app every day and choose which card to apply to which transaction. Issuing banks themselves are merely one of many connection points.

With a model like Curve, there’s always the potential to bypass issuing banks entirely for some transactions. This is something that Curve has tried with their cashback product. Known as “Curve Cash” which provides cashback of 1% (or more) at selected retailers. The cashback is returned to the user as stored value within the Curve app, and then shows as a “Curve Cash” payment option. It’s a quasi-currency that can be accumulated, selected, and then spent like any other payment option. This was a clear example of how transactions could take place without any bank involvement. And while users accumulated only modest amounts, the concept was proven. In the future, issuing banks would potentially be only one of the payment options for Curve account holders.

As years went by, the two card schemes could see Curve’s growth. US expansion barely got out of first gear before pulling back, yet Curve had, for the most part, shown real momentum.26 Hype often followed the company, it innovated quickly in expanding its product offering, and while it never turned a profit, its numbers were improving over time. But it wasn’t enough. Curve got acquired by Lloyds Banking Group after expressing concern that the company would run out of money if it didn’t find a buyer this year.

The reality is that Curve was never a competitive threat for Visa and Mastercard. It needed them. They worked together. At the same time, Curve proved that its model of switching between cards worked — at least to some extent. In recent years, both Visa and Mastercard responded with their own offerings, which took inspiration from Curve. However, as you would expect, the models the card schemes settled on were different; their offerings are issuer-centric, in line with their overall business models.

The New World — Credentials Over Cards?

While Mastercard was Curve’s primary partner, periodic discussions with Visa were held to keep Visa informed of Curve’s business and explain the operating model. This dialogue was critical as Visa never blocked Curve. Visa kept a close eye on how the fintech operated, and it was Visa who first launched the card networks’ answer to Curve.

Visa Flexible Credential (VFC) was announced by Visa in 2024 and launched first in Asia before announcing partnerships in the US and the Middle East later in the year. The product assigns a specific card number to a VFC customer account.27 This is known as the primary credential, and once assigned, allows consumers to dynamically select from various funding sources — known as secondary credentials. Examples of funding sources include debit, credit, instalments, as well as joint accounts, multi-currency accounts, and rewards points.

The financial landscape is undergoing a radical transformation, and at the heart of this revolution is the move towards flexible payment credentials. Traditional one-size-fits-all credit is rapidly being replaced by dynamic, consumer-centric financing options

- Ex CEO of Marqeta, writing recently on his Substack

The innovation is a single payment credential with rules that route spend based on predefined criteria.28 Use cases include:

• Users may utilise their debit card as their main day-to-day spending card.

• But for transactions over £100, they can direct this payment to a credit card.

• Transactions over £1,000 can be split into instalments, such as the option to pay in four equal instalments.

• For some couples, even if they keep individual accounts, they may wish to pay their utility bills from a joint account and direct debit payments specifically to a joint account.

• In some markets, consumers pay in both local currency and non-local currency — such as US Dollars. Rules can change the funding source between different currency balances.

• Some card issuers offer rewards points as part of their ecosystem and users can draw on their rewards points at certain merchants.

The transaction is authorised on the primary credential and then settled to Visa with the secondary credential alongside information confirming it was a VFC transaction.

This difference between funding source and payment source is one similarity with Curve’s model. Yet in the case of Visa’s offering, the main difference is that the primary and secondary credentials are both within the same issuing bank. This should be no surprise. Visa’s core customers are issuing banks, and improving the offering of issuing banks and level of spend within banks is a core objective of Visa.

Mastercard launched a similar product to Visa Flexible Credential called Mastercard One Credential. The products position themselves slightly differently, yet for their bank partners the outcome is the same. Both provide a rules engine to select a transaction funding source on top of existing card rails, with APIs for issuers, and settlement that links primary and secondary credentials.29

What we’re not doing at this time is going beyond the walls of their bank and asking the consumer to connect other accounts from other institutions. Note that this is not a design limitation—it’s actually by design.

Mastercard’s Chief Consumer Product Officer Bunita Sawhney confirmed that Mastercard actively seeks to keep the user within the walls of their bank. This is a key aspect of the card schemes’ response to Curve — provide infrastructure to issuing partners to build their own flexible model within their own ecosystem, as reported in The Financial Brand.

We’ve seen that Visa and Mastercard’s response to Curve was to build solutions within their own ecosystems to help deepen relationships with their issuers. Essentially, if you can utilise multiple funding sources within one bank, then why would you want to utilise external funding sources? But ultimately it’s up to issuers themselves to make their proposition compelling for consumers.

One last point I want to make is how flexible credentials change the competitive dynamic between Visa and Mastercard. This is potentially the most unexplored aspect of this story.

In terms of card issuing, ways in which Visa and Mastercard can grow revenue include:

• Capturing organic transaction growth from increasing volumes of card payments as more of the world economy goes cashless.

• Raising charges from card scheme fees, which are not regulated to anywhere near the extent that interchange fees are.30

• Winning volumes from each other!

The last point is key. Many banks traditionally maintain relationships with both Visa and Mastercard. It’s common for banks to use one network for debit cards and the other for credit cards. The account managers within Visa and Mastercard are looking to grow volumes with each issuer they manage. And banks know that by actively using both card schemes, they can compare and contrast service levels, product innovation, and commercial value offered by each network.

However, flexible credential products only function effectively if a bank’s entire portfolio is either with Visa or Mastercard.31 If your credit cards are with Visa but debit with Mastercard, then you can’t switch between them. This creates a “winner-takes-all” dynamic where success in selling a flexible credential approach also depends on converting as much of an issuer’s portfolio as possible to the respective network.

This dynamic is why you’re likely to see many neobanks and spin-off banks opt for flexible credential offerings in the short term, rather than longstanding traditional legacy banks. Newer organisations have a clean slate in terms of card scheme relationships and will find it easier to opt for one network wholesale. They also have API-first architecture suited to integrating with third-party providers, which is helpful, as flexible credential offerings will often require third parties to help integrate and run aspects of the programme.32 Additionally, while legacy banks often manage their credit and debit portfolios separately — sometimes even within different parts of the bank — neobanks don’t have this constraint.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture!

Please leave a comment or share with a friend or colleague if you enjoyed reading this edition. It’s much appreciated and helps grow the audience of this newsletter.

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world, and why it matters.

This is part two of a two-part series examining eleven ways that Apple Pay changed payments. Why eleven? Because this year marks the eleventh anniversary of Apple Pay, which launched in the US on October 20th, 2014. Part one can be found here.

Imagine waking up at 5am on a Monday morning. It’s early November and you’ve got an important flight to catch. It’s a business trip. You’re excited to get to New York as you’ll be meeting your favourite client. He always meets you at the same coffee shop downtown, with oversized comfy chairs, and the best espresso you’ve found outside of Italy. You dress, grab your backpack, and jump in a taxi. But when you get to the airport, it hits you like a ton of bricks. You’ve left your passport at home.

Yet this stomach-churning situation may soon be a thing of the past.

#6.

Digital ID Integrates Payments and Identity Verification

Last week, Apple announced Digital ID for Apple Wallet. The same device that holds your boarding pass and credit cards will soon allow you to add your passport to an iPhone or even an Apple Watch. Here’s how it works: Rather than presenting your passport at the airport, tapping your Apple device at a TSA checkpoint will be enough. These days, no one leaves home without their iPhone (or another smartphone model), so at least for US domestic travel, your stress is about to melt away. Although, to be clear, the solution will not entirely replace a passport as Digital ID is not sufficient for international travel, a passport will still be needed for that. Yet it seems possible that within the next ten years, a Digital ID could suffice for some international flights.

Note: Not all domestic US airports are utilising Digital ID at this time so please check before you travel, and at this early stage it’s best to take your passport as well just in case the solution doesn’t work as intended.

Looking back over the past 11 years of Apple Pay, this progression from payments to Digital ID stands out as a key milestone. Consumers are comfortable double-tapping their phones to pay, and Digital ID sits within Apple Wallet — the ecosystem that stores not only payment credentials but now, digital identity too.

Questions of identity and payments are often thought of as adjacent yet separate challenges. Apple is now starting to bring this together. Think of the last time you opened a bank account on your iPhone or opened an account on a crypto app. It’s likely you had to take a photo of an ID, such as a passport or a driver’s license, and then verify with a selfie. This process will, in some cases, get replaced with Apple’s Digital ID. And is there the prospect to bring payments and identity together in other use cases?

#7.

Apple Pay Accelerated Virtual Cards

Ten years ago opening a bank account meant going into a branch to make an appointment to open an account, and going back to the branch on another day to provide documents and sign some forms (this is exactly what happened to me). What followed was a wait of days to get paperwork in the post confirming the account opening. Cards arrived separately. And of course, the PIN number for any cards took another few days to arrive. In total, it could easily take a week for a new account to be truly operational.

The rise of neobanks changed this experience dramatically. Opening a bank account now takes minutes, especially with a bank like Revolut. However, what’s made the account opening experience significantly better is virtual cards. Rather than get frustrated waiting for your new card and PIN number to arrive in the post, virtual cards allow users to load their card to Apple Wallet and spend immediately via Apple Pay. It’s easy to take this for granted in the UK, as many banks now offer virtual cards. Remarkable still is that we don’t have to wait for a PIN number to arrive in the post, as it can often be accessed within a bank app via another Apple innovation we now take for granted: FaceID.

In some cases, virtual cards can be used without Apple Pay — this is mainly seen in business-to-business payments, where virtual card details can be sent to a supplier via APIs. On the consumer side, Apple Pay has normalised the use of virtual cards. Tech that most consumers were unaware of less than ten years ago is now de rigueur in personal finance.

#8.

Apple Pay Accelerated Embedded Finance

In a world of APIs, companies can integrate financial services into their apps and wider product offerings even if fintech isn’t the mainstay of their business. The concept is known as embedded finance, and it’s a phenomenon that can be seen throughout the economy. Delivery companies offer loans through third-party lenders. In the US, Uber provides its drivers with a debit card and a digital bank account for instant access to their earnings. Starbucks is a coffee company, yet its well-known loyalty programme is one of the most notable examples of a stored-value payment system.

Even when a company isn’t a bank or fintech we can see financial services that sit within apps and ecosystems, sometimes on the consumer side, sometimes on the business side, or even both. Wherever we look, we can see embedded finance.

Even if many companies launch their embedded finance offering without Apple Pay, they usually add it later as they realise it’s essential — consumers and businesses expect it. Payments is a core facet of embedded finance and Apple Pay plays an essential role in how non-financial brands build financial products.

Lars Markull, Founder of Embedded Finance Review, told me that:

Non-financial brands have a crucial advantage: they can integrate financial products directly into their existing services, something standalone fintechs can’t do. But they still have to compete with fintechs, and some features [such as Apple Pay] are table stakes.

As a distribution model for financial services, embedded finance will only grow in importance. It’s expected to be worth more than $100 billion by 2030, and by then, according to McKinsey, it could be up to 15% of banking revenue.

Actually, the clear demarcation between embedded finance, fintech, and banking will erode, and consumers will notice less and care less who provides financial products, provided they function as expected. The model of delivering financial products is evolving to meet consumers where they want to spend their time.

#9.

How Apple Pay Accelerated BNPL

Apple has an advantage as a company that controls both hardware and software. Take AirPods. Once you’re used to them, it’s hard to go back to something else. AirPods connect multiple Apple devices and make switching between them effortless. The synergy of hardware and operating system (software) can also be seen in payments. Apple Pay takes advantage of this.

Apple Pay Later was the first BNPL-style offering facilitated by Apple. It allowed users to split purchases into instalments via the simplicity of an Apple Pay transaction. Users could choose “Pay Later” at eligible online checkouts to split a transaction into four payments over six weeks, with one payment upfront and three equal payments every two weeks. However, this strategy lasted barely more than a year. The solution launched in March 2023, but by June 2024, Apple had moved from a model of direct financing to a partner and bank-led model.

The change of strategy let Apple step away from the lending and regulatory requirements of BNPL. At the same time, the shift in approach enhanced Apple’s distribution both domestically and internationally. In the US Apple introduced a BNPL partnership with Affirm, and has since added Citi’s BNPL offering to Apple Pay. In Europe, Apple Pay instalments are live with Monzo in the UK and CaixaBank in Spain.

As a Monzo customer I’ve been able to experience Monzo’s BNPL offering first-hand. Known as Monzo Flex, after paying with Apple Pay, I can open the Monzo app, find any transaction from the past two weeks, and split it into three separate monthly instalments, interest-free, or extend it to six instalments with interest.

#10.

Tap to Pay on iPhone Marked the Next Phase of Apple Pay

Tap to Pay on iPhone is what Apple calls SoftPOS (Software Point of Sale). Turn your phone into a payment terminal. Apple didn’t invent this technology — it was available on Android for years before Apple decided to offer their own iPhone-based solution. Yet, as ever, once Apple got on board, it was only then that the technology truly took off.

This weekend I was at a craft market in Battersea Power Station in London.

Every seller was accepting payments either with Tap to Pay on iPhone or a small payment device from companies such as Zettle and SumUp. This made sense, as the original plan with SoftPOS was to tap into the “micro merchant” segment and remove the friction of buying and setting up a payment device. Market traders, DIY workers, and any business that can efficiently function with one man or one woman at the helm were prime candidates for SoftPOS.

But now, even large retailers utilise SoftPOS. With an iPhone, staff on the shop floor can both manage inventory and accept transactions without the need to send customers to queue at a centralised checkout area. This is the case in Lululemon stores in London. Staff can check inventory and bring the size you need, and check out there and then. Lowering friction means more sales, as it eliminates the risk of customers getting frustrated and leaving their goods behind due to a long queue at checkout.

Tap to Pay on iPhone is available via companies such as Stripe and Adyen, and small businesses can enable the solution directly in seconds when using neobanks such as Monzo and Revolut. With this technology, every bank can become a payments company and enable contactless card payment acceptance on the devices of freelancers and SMEs.

In countries such as Brazil, SoftPOS on Android phones quickly found its user base. It didn’t take long for the country to get over a million SoftPOS users, and this continues to grow, but in Western economies, the tech didn’t take off until Apple came on board.

Apple Pay lets users pay (send money) with their iPhone, and Tap to Pay on iPhone allows businesses to receive money. It was the natural and subsequent evolution of on-device NFC technology that powered Apple Pay, opening up to payment acceptance. SoftPOS, especially following Apple’s involvement, disrupted the payment terminal market and was part of a broader shift in payments — as in many industries — moving primarily from hardware to software.

#11.

Does Apple Pay Mean We Can Leave Our Wallets at Home?

When leaving home what’s the one thing that you absolutely have to take with you, that you can’t leave your house or apartment without? Something you have that is so important, if you notice you’ve forgotten it, even when halfway down the street, you’ll go back to get it.

Less than ten years ago, I might have said my wallet, but these days it’s definitely my iPhone. I always pay with Apple Pay. When riding the Tube, I use Apple Pay alongside the fast transit feature, so I don’t need to double-tap or use Face ID before each transaction. Additionally, I use my iPhone to listen to music, and sometimes I use it to read newspapers or Kindle books while traveling. In short, I can now leave my wallet at home, but I don’t dare leave home without my iPhone.

Last year The New York Times ran a piece titled The Youths Have Spoken: Wallets Are Uncool. Go Digital. The article explored the extent to which Gen Z primarily use digital devices, and often don’t carry a wallet. A survey of Gen Z in the US found that 80% regularly use mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, but this goes beyond payments:

Younger people are increasingly using their phones for purposes that older adults would use a traditional wallet for, like carrying documents such as a driver’s license, boarding passes and event tickets.

In fact, for boarding passes, airlines such as Ryanair have moved to digital as standard, and expect all travellers to present their boarding pass on a smartphone. So it’s not just our wallets; anything that could have once been paper-based is now ripe for adding to Apple Wallet.

Relying on our phones is both good and bad. Having everything in one place is convenient. But most adults — and many teenagers — are dealing with phone addiction on some level (even if we don’t want to admit it). Many of us wish we could stop picking up our phones as much as we do, and techniques and ideas to stop scrolling proliferate online.

Many bestselling books tackle this topic. Earlier this year, I read Smartphone Nation by Dr Kaitlyn Regehr. I didn’t learn too much from this one, probably because I’ve already read Digital Minimalism and other books by Cal Newport that address the topic in a way I could relate to better. Yet exploring how we can use our phones less becomes ever harder as tech means we need our phones for more and more aspects of our daily lives. Many of us are working on this balance. But one thing I would contend is that Apple Pay has allowed us to leave our wallets behind.

Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

Why Subscribe to Payments Culture?

• Every week (or so), get one long-form email with my curated insights.

• Some weeks, I’ll add additional content including personal essays, case studies, and interviews with fintech leaders.

• Paid subscribers get at least 1x additional essay(s) per month, access to the full archive, and more features currently under development.

  Subscribe now

If you’d like to support this newsletter you can get a monthly membership for less than the cost of a beer (in London). An annual membership is more than 95% cheaper than attending a big fintech conference — and you may learn more by reading this!

Note: You can refer friends or colleagues to earn complimentary month(s) of paid membership.

Get in touch

I’m always interested to hear from those who read Payments Culture.

Feedback, collaboration opportunities, or anything else - it’s all welcome.

You can email me, message me here, or on LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading! Matt

No but that’s OK. Let me explain.

The world is changing fast, and careers are changing too

Let me take you back to 2020. I’d been working in payments for over a decade and my career was going well. But since then, I’ve experienced a redundancy, a company that I was about to join lost its funding and went under, and I had a job which didn’t work out at all.

When I first started writing this newsletter my original goal was to write a few posts, raise my profile, and help me find work. Once I got a job I’d stop writing. But it didn’t work out like that. I’ve kept going, and kept writing. The perfect job never happened.

So why did I keep writing when it didn’t work as a job-hunting strategy?

What I’ve come to realise is that my writing is actually me trying to make sense of the world.

In today’s world it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in information. There’s always more to learn, and more that we could know about any given topic. No matter how much you know, it’s easy to feel like there’s more you should know. It’s an endless cycle which we can’t stop. And it’s exhausting.

If you’re working in payments and the wider fintech industry this barrage of information leads to a delicate balance. Keeping up with industry trends and the latest developments can be essential for progressing in one’s career, yet at the same time the amount of noise on any given day renders most information useless.

What makes understanding fintech harder than ever are the non-stop announcements and press releases. Every company wants to appear innovative (who can blame them). Each day there’s a new partnership or product launch, and the imperative is for each and every one to sound like a game changer, but a majority of announcements are really not that important.

With so much happening in this industry (and so much noise), the best approach to keep up with payments in 2025 is to find a few publications you like reading. Read them regularly, but consciously avoid keeping up with every announcement and every breaking news story. Because, quite frankly, it’s impossible. (There are reams of fintech newsletters out there and you won’t be able to read all of them.)

When I started writing Payments Culture my goal was not to comment on every one of the top breaking news stories, not to round-up the most notable announcements of the past week, and to not be a single source of payments news. If this is what you’re looking for then there’s much better publications out there. My goal is to go into the wider context and to understand stories beyond the headlines — why certain trends and technology shifts truly matter.

With this in mind, I challenged myself over the summer to distill what compels me to write into a few paragraphs. What follows is a summary explaining what’s behind Payments Culture. Consider this an informal re-launch of this newsletter.

What is Payments Culture?

In June 2007 I moved to Germany for an internship. I naively assumed that I could use my UK credit card until my 700 Euro intern “salary” came in at the end of the month.

I was wrong.

In Germany, back then, I could count on one hand the number of shops, restaurants, and cafés that allowed me to pay by credit card. I had money, yet couldn’t spend it.

That summer in Germany was my first lesson in how money moves differently around the world.

Over time I realised that these differences are everywhere:

• Japan is a hyper-modern society, but they still love cash.

• Chinese tourists struggle to pay in London because their mobile wallets don’t work the same way abroad.

• In parts of East Africa, consumers leapfrogged straight to mobile payments without ever using traditional banking.

Payments Culture is where I explore these differences and what they mean for anyone working in fintech, finance, or tech — or just curious about how money works.

Why Subscribe to Payments Culture?

Most of what I write falls into three main areas. This is my mini-framework:

Some recent posts highlight certain aspects of this framework:

• Can Revolut Compete With American Express

Regulation explains why on a like-for-like basis Revolut cannot compete with Amex.

• Germany’s Legacy Payments Tech and the Impact of AI

Culture explains why credit cards have never taken off in Germany.

• Crossing the Chasm With Payments (Part 1)

Innovation explains why some companies “cross the chasm” while others get stuck and never make the leap.

These examples highlight how the way we pay and get paid is changing.

But it’s deeper than that.

In fintech, we often focus on the latest big trends, gigantic funding rounds, and outsized personalities, while the gradual shifts in culture and technology — which really make the difference — are rarely covered to the extent that they should be.

Change is slow then suddenly quick.

And change doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens as a part of wider societal and cultural change. My focus is on these deeper shifts that often get missed.

Payments Culture comes with:

• Expert perspective from my 15+ years working in the industry

• Real-world stories that go beyond the headlines

• Market intelligence you won’t find in press releases

Who should read this:

Fintech strategists, investors, operators, founders, analysts, product managers, consultants, journalists, entrepreneurs, and anyone else interested in how money moves, around the world — and why it matters.

Here’s what my readers say:

Here’s what this looks like:

• Every week, get one long-form email with my curated insights on a specific topic.

• Some weeks, I’ll add additional content including personal essays, case studies, and interviews with fintech leaders.

• Paid subscribers get at least 1x additional essay(s) per month, access to the full archive, and more features currently under development.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support this newsletter you can get a monthly membership for less than the cost of a beer (in London). An annual membership is more than 95% cheaper than attending a big fintech conference — and you may learn more by reading this!

Note: You can refer friends or colleagues to earn complimentary month(s) of paid membership.

Get in touch

I’m always interested to hear from those who read Payments Culture.

Feedback, collaboration opportunities, or anything else - it’s all welcome.

You can email me, message me here, or on LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading! Matt

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world, and why it matters.

Apple Pay has been a huge success. The service launched in the US on October 20th 2014, and today, from Canada to Paraguay to Vietnam, thousands of banks support Apple Pay. The solution is available in around ninety countries so far, with more added every year.

Last year I wrote How Apple Pay Changed Payments. This was one of my most popular posts of the year and it was rated as one of the Best Deep Reads of 2024 by This Week in Fintech. But there was so much more I could have said. Over the next two posts I’m going to tell the story of Apple Pay through eleven changes that have impacted payments.

In this post, you’ll learn:

• How Apple succeeded with mobile payments, where earlier attempts failed

• How Apple Pay made fintech more accessible

• How Apple Pay generates more revenue than many standalone companies

• How transit payments became the ultimate testing ground for Apple Pay

• How Apple Pay cemented the global divide between cards and QR codes

Let me be clear: many of the things I’m going to discuss may have happened, and may have progressed without Apple Pay. Yet my argument is that Apple Pay ignited a seismic shift. The launch of Apple Pay was one of the most impactful events in the industry. It made so many things possible in a way that we take for granted today.

#1.

Apple Pay Succeeded Where Other Mobile Payments Failed

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Tim Cook, when quizzed about Apple’s perceived slowness in rolling out AI, stated “We’re perfectly fine with not being first. As it turns out, it takes a while to get it really great. It takes a lot of iteration.”

Apple’s instinct is to be the best, not the first, and Apple Pay was no exception.

Two examples from before the Apple Pay era help set the scene. One success1 and one failure can help illustrate the challenges Apple would face.

The Success of FeliCa (from 2004)

Japan got its first NFC-enabled phones2 way back in 2004.

Sony and NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, formed a joint venture called FeliCa Networks. FeliCa developed a standard which soon became the dominant NFC system not just in Japan but across East Asia.3 Major retailers such as FamilyMart accepted payments via FeliCa, and by 2011, mobile payments accounted for around 12 percent of Japan’s cashless transactions. However, with the rise of the iPhone, the share of mobile payments declined, and it wasn’t until 2016, with the launch of Apple Pay in Japan, that Apple added support for the FeliCa standard.4

Google Wallet Struggles (from 2011)

The first Android phone with NFC was Google’s Nexus S, which was manufactured by Samsung and released in December 2010. Google launched mobile payments with a solution known as Google Wallet in 2011 with the updated Nexus S 4G. The initial launch was with one carrier (Sprint), one card issuer (Citibank), and relied on merchants having contactless payment terminals supplied by Mastercard.5 Google struggled to scale the solution.6 This should be no surprise given that in 2011 less than 0.5% of all payment terminals had contactless acceptance capabilities! The solution was stuck in a chicken-and-egg scenario, which is incredibly common when trying to scale payment technology.

Back in 2014 Google didn’t yet make their own devices. They relied on device manufacturers such as Samsung, Motorola, and even Huawei to showcase Android. Conversely, Apple had both hardware and software in-house, with almost 42% of US smartphone market share, and as iPhone users tended to have higher incomes (this is still true today). It should be no surprise that Apple was the one player that could move the market.

Apple Pay Enters the Scene (from 2014)

It wasn’t until Apple came along with Apple Pay, and a model which brought together hardware, issuers, acquirers and merchants into a new ecosystem that the true potential of NFC was realised — at least outside of Japan. From a technical perspective, owning both hardware and software allowed Apple to innovate with on-device biometrics, tokenisation, and build an effortless user experience.

As with all innovation, timing is key, and Apple got the timing right. Many large retailers were planning on updating their payment terminals by late 2015 due to a change in regulations.7

The surge in contactless capable payment terminals in the US can be seen in these statistics:

• In 2014 at the time of Apple Pay’s launch only around 7% of payment terminals could accept contactless payments.

• By mid-2018, 70% of payment terminals were contactless ready.

• By the end of 2018 more than 95% of all payment terminals shipped were contactless capable.

In some respects Apple’s timing was fortuitous. But they built their own wave with a self-reinforcing ecosystem that consumers loved and merchants couldn’t afford to miss out on.

To quote How Apple Pay Changed Payments:

Users saw that it was fun to pay with Apple Pay, and retailers didn’t want to risk losing a sale if the cardholder couldn’t pay how they wanted to. Nothing changed overnight, but gradually, the market shifted.

In the US market the story of contactless payments became the story of Apple Pay.

Unlike FeliCa, which was only successful in Asia, Apple succeeded in making Apple Pay a global phenomenon. But success in Apple’s home market was the main factor which set the course for mobile payments to go from experimentation to exponential growth.8

Privacy has always been central to Apple’s philosophy. In the above interview from 2014 Tim Cook makes clear that Apple cannot see Apple Pay transactions.

#2.

Apple Pay Made Fintech Accessible

A few years back, after one of the COVID lockdowns my Mom was visiting me in London.

Due to the restrictions we hadn’t met for some months, and since our last meeting my Mom had got an Apple Watch.

When grabbing a couple of coffees at a Pret cafe my Mom paid with her Apple Watch!

It happened so quickly. I was surprised. I hadn’t shown her how to do this.

My Mom is from the Baby Boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964), and the stereotype is that as we get older, our ability to use new technology worsens. As we get older we are more likely to use cash. There is some evidence to support this. A study by Age UK shows that those aged over 75 are twice as likely to have used cash for a purchase than the all-age average.

But adding cards to Apple Pay is straightforward and once set up, cards can be accessed across various devices. Using Apple Pay doesn’t require remembering a PIN, nor taking a card out of a purse or wallet. The user only has to double-tap on an iPhone or Apple Watch. It’s really easy to use.

Budgeting was often seen as one of the key benefits of cash, as you can only spend what you have in hand. Yet these days, many banks offer instant balance updates and easy-to-use apps — tracking spending is easier than ever.

In a world where so many fintech apps claim to be “democratising” something or other, I can’t help but feel that Apple Pay is a case where fintech innovation has actually made life easier and more accessible. And while not all merchants accept Apple Pay yet, its reach continues to expand.9

#3.

Apple Pay Shows How Non-Payments Companies Can Create Substantial Revenue From Payments

Back in 2014, the Financial Times reported that Apple gets 0.15% of every Apple Pay transaction.

This comes from interchange fees that card issuers receive, not from additional charges on businesses. As you would expect, Apple has never confirmed or denied this figure as their contractual arrangements with issuing banks are confidential. Outside of the US, the margin is thought to be lower than 0.15% and a global average in the region of 0.08%-0.10% is likely.

How much revenue does Apple Pay generate for Apple? Apple Pay sits within Apple’s services business area, which is set to generate over $100 billion this year. But Apple doesn’t break out Apple Pay numbers directly. Instead, it’s captured alongside services such as iCloud and Apple Care in the overall services numbers.

However, industry analysts estimate that Apple Pay generates around $2-4 billion in annual revenue.10 These estimates are based on data from 2022 and 2023, and the reality today could be much higher. Apple Pay is likely to be more than 1% of Apple’s total revenue. In addition to transaction fees, other revenue lines that may sit within Apple Pay’s business area, such as fees from Tap to Pay on iPhone and fees associated with other adjacent product lines.

Apple has demonstrated that payments can be a multi-billion dollar business even when it’s not a company’s main focus. Apple’s primary business is selling iPhones, MacBooks, and other hardware. Although the company aims to grow services to over 30% of total revenue by 2030, for the foreseeable future Apple’s main revenue driver will remain hardware.11

Other companies with extensive distribution reach and networks on both the consumer and business sides can benefit from incorporating payments into their offering. Last year I wrote about Meta’s Payments Potential, and Google has also successfully monetised payments with Google Pay.12 Expect more companies to lean into payments to diversify revenue in the years ahead.

Note: Based on industry estimates Apple Pay could be generating more revenue than Adyen.

#4. Apple Pay Made It Easier to Travel Across Cities

Transport for London introduced the Oyster card to the Tube in 2003. This contactless smart card required users to top up credit before travel. The system worked well, and passengers could travel until their balance ran low. Traveling with an Oyster card was more efficient than buying tickets for each journey, or each day.

However, locals and tourists often formed long queues at ticket machines every morning as they sought to add money to their cards. This improved when the Tube got contactless card readers at each station in 2014. These could accept Oyster cards, but also contactless payment cards. The Tube was a great use case for contactless payments as the tap of a card opened the ticket barrier, and unlike with Oyster, there was no need to regularly top up a balance.

When Apple Pay launched in the UK in 2015 the Tube immediately supported it. The London underground provided a perfect testing ground for Apple Pay in the UK. Consumers were already familiar with contactless payment cards, and they saw the move to Apple Pay as an evolution rather than a revolution. Transport for London quickly became the largest Apple Pay merchant in the UK, and likely still is today.

In 2019 London got Express Transit functionality. Users set one payment card as their preferred transit payment option, and when traveling on the Tube no authentication — such as Face ID — is needed.13 This enhancement made getting through ticket barriers even smoother.

But it’s not just in London that Apple Pay made transit easier.

Two other examples are Paris and Tokyo. Unlike London, which operates with the tap of standard credit and debit cards, Paris and Tokyo have specific local solutions. Based on user location, Apple Pay automatically prompts users to add local transit cards to their Apple Wallet. In Paris, users can add journeys to their Apple Wallet via a local transport app using Apple Pay. In Tokyo, users add Yen to an IC card, and funds are deducted based on the journey length once completed.14

These examples show the extent to which Apple goes in order to localise its solutions to each market. It makes total sense as transit payments are high volume and high footfall. Like what happened in London, once a consumer gets used to tapping to travel on local transit they’ll be more likely to use Apple Pay in other scenarios also.

What’s striking is the user experience. Imagine arriving in Tokyo after a long flight. Rather than having to work out the ticket machines for the Metro system and get a paper ticket, you’ll get a message on your iPhone to add the local transit card to your Apple Wallet and top up in local currency. That’s all you need to do. Simple. Now you can travel.

#5.

Apple Pay Has Cemented the Bifurcation of Payments

This section is about payments and fintech, but also geopolitics, trade, and competing regional power blocs. It’s a story of the modern era that is fast-moving and ever-evolving.

This summer I spoke of the bifurcation of payments.

The idea is straightforward.

When it comes to payment technology, the world has split into two camps.

Paradigm 1

In the first camp, you’ll predominantly find Western economies such as the US, UK, EU, Australia, and New Zealand. The main cashless payment option in these countries is card payments on the Visa and Mastercard rails. Other options exist, but the preponderance of cashless transactions flows through the card rails of the major card schemes.

Paradigm 2

The second camp sits across much of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In these markets QR code payments linked to domestic mobile wallets or direct bank payments are the norm. Not only are local payment systems cheaper, but in many cases, a local ecosystem of integrations has built up around them. In some cases local or regional superapps lead the way. (Grab is one such example.)

Cards vs QR codes

In markets that follow the first paradigm, Apple Pay is so easy to use that QR code payments feel cumbersome and clunky. Additional services such as BNPL add depth to the core payments offering, and Apple Wallet can hold loyalty cards, making the whole checkout process super easy for consumers.

Many markets operating in the second paradigm bypassed card infrastructure entirely and went straight from cash to QR-based digital wallets. For developing economies, QR codes can be the fastest and most cost-effective way to start accepting payments. There’s virtually zero cost to getting started.

Payments Sovereignty is Digital Sovereignty

As Apple Pay made card payments better, there were fewer incentives for Western governments and regulators to explore alternatives to cards. However, for some countries, developing domestic payment infrastructure outside of the purview of Visa and Mastercard is a national imperative.

Domestic payments infrastructure, controlled and regulated locally, is a form of digital sovereignty. Rightly or wrongly Visa and Mastercard may be forced to cut a market from their network due to political decisions made in the US. This drives some countries to develop local systems alongside the card networks, as a back up — as a just-in-case-we-need-it kind of thing.

We often don’t think of payments tech as geopolitical, but in today’s world, almost everything is.

The BRICS countries, which mainly sit within the second paradigm, are working on various payments initiatives, and universal innovations such as Stablecoins and Agentic Commerce have implications beyond payments alone. Cashless payments once meant card payments, but in recent times an alternative model has accelerated. In our new world, payments sovereignty, geopolitical turbulence, and fintech innovation are relentlessly intersecting.

Apple Pay didn’t create the bifurcation of payments, but the success of Apple Pay has made the card-based system even more compelling than it once was. The success of Apple Pay has cemented the bifurcation of payments.

Thanks for reading Payments Culture!

Next week in part two: Did Apple Pay kill the physical wallet? How Tap to Pay on iPhone took SoftPOS to a new level — and how virtual cards might be one of the most underrated second-order consequences of Apple Pay.

Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

Exploring the strategy, culture, and trends shaping the world of payments and fintech.

2025 is the year that every senior manager looked at AI and asked: How can this improve my business?

AI can improve processes and optimise outcomes. But enabling AI doesn’t always mean plain sailing. Earlier this year, Klarna replaced much of its customer service team with AI, yet they’ve since tempered ambitions to automate in favour of a more human-centred approach. The challenge is identifying where AI can deliver tangible business results.

S&P Global Market Intelligence report that 46% of AI proof-of-concepts were scrapped before they reached production. This isn’t a bad thing. AI is an inherently experimental technology, and culling underperforming pilots is part of the experimentation philosophy required to unlock genuine business impact.

For payments specifically, the difficulty is going from training models and implementing small pilot projects to scaling in a live environment, with all of the intricacies and challenges this can involve — especially when dealing with the need to process 100s of transactions a second.

As Europe’s largest Payment Services Provider (PSP) and one of the top five globally, Worldline operates across 170 countries. This scale matters. Scale should allow for experimentation. However, as many of us who’ve worked in large organisations will know, nurturing the right culture that allows for innovation, iteration, and launching products at the cutting edge is easier said than done.

Improving acceptance rates with machine learning

Transaction routing is one area where Worldline has seen AI deliver real world results. I sat down with Khalil Kammoun, Head of Shared Services at Worldline, and Julien Carme, Lead Data Scientist for AI Transaction Routing, to understand how they’ve turned AI-Routing from concept to reality, and the benefits this has delivered for businesses around the world.

The company connects multi-national businesses to a variety of acquirers and payment processors. In a process sometimes known as payment orchestration, Worldline can deliver transactions to providers based on agreed criteria. One core requirement is the transaction authorisation rate or success rate, put simply, will the acquirer accept or decline the transactions they receive? Cost is another important factor. One provider may process debit card transactions at a lower cost than another, but for the same provider, credit card transactions may be more expensive.

Usually optimising for payment success means using static rules. Based on set rules, providers route transactions to the best processor to maximise acceptance. Payment systems can route transactions based on factors such as BIN range, transaction currency, customer IP address, or even transaction value, to name just a few examples.

Julien told me, “Standard routing models take in large amounts of data but can’t capture changes in acquirer behaviour over time.” This is because traditional orchestration models depend on providers manually examining data and updating predefined rules. With an AI-based orchestration model the system receives feedback with every transaction and continuously adjusts its behaviour.

Worldline’s AI-Routing uses neural networks — machine learning models that analyse dozens of factors at once and capture patterns that humans can’t easily codify.

“The system can create its own rules and find efficiencies,” Julien noted. At times this approach delivered surprising results, “We’ve had cases where the platform routed transactions to an acquirer that was more expensive, but had a much better acceptance rate.” In this instance the merchant benefited from higher total revenue despite paying higher fees per transaction. Such a scenario would be hard to replicate in a model with static rules, showing how machine learning models have the potential to deliver unexpected upside in a live environment.

From training the model to proven results

When Worldline started the AI-Routing project it was unclear if the programme would be a success. Payments orchestration with static rules was long-established but there was no clear benchmark for what success looked like with an AI-based routing model.

The AI-Routing project was premised on the belief that transactions are more likely to be accepted by some acquirers than others. In the test environment the company simulated many different scenarios and saw positive potential with various experimental datasets. But there was no certainty of how this would translate into a production environment with live transactions and significant payment volumes.

“In a live environment the model has to decide which acquirer to route a transaction to within milliseconds,” Khalil said, emphasising that the solution must maintain end-to-end processing speed despite the multiple factors under evaluation in real-time.

When asked about the results of AI-Routing, Khalil explains, “At a baseline level, rule-based routing models deliver an uplift of up to 3% in payment acceptance rates. With AI-Routing capabilities, merchants have seen an average additional 2% uplift in acceptance rates. In some cases even a 0.3% increase in transaction success equated to over a million Euros in additional revenue, which shows how incremental improvements can lead to significant gains for our merchants.”

Analytics and new developments

Worldline has developed a suite of data analytics to allow merchants to better understand the performance of the AI-Routing solution. A team of consultants works directly with businesses to understand their metrics and provide valuable insights on the uplift in acceptance rates.

The consulting team can explain the trends and dynamics that businesses see in their transaction flows. This process helps not only merchants understand their metrics, but also within Worldline, these deep conversations with merchants help shape the product roadmap and feature development.

Share

On a monthly basis more merchants are utilising Worldline’s AI-Routing solution, and further enhancements are planned over time — it seems likely the popularity of this solution will only increase. This was one of the AI projects that worked out well.

Although there is, of course, competition. Mastercard has recently announced its own payment optimisation platform, and other providers are also considering how machine learning can help improve merchant outcomes. Worldline’s strength will be staying close to merchants and building on its success to date.

Thanks to the Worldline team for discussing this topic and sharing their story with me.

If you are a fintech company and want to share your story please reach out and let’s talk further. You can contact me via email, on LinkedIn, or on X.

Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

Did you read?

This newsletter explores how money moves, around the world. In this weekend edition I cover three fintech stories that have caught my eye in the past week.

I’m currently looking for new opportunities. I’m open to short-term assignments as well as permanent positions. You can email me or contact me on LinkedIn to discuss further.

Subscribe now

Monzo and Nubank eye the US

Breaking into the US is the dream for many European fintechs. As many find out, it’s arduous work, and some spend millions of dollars only to walk away as they can’t make it work. (N26 tried to crack the US market for two-and-a-half years but then gave up.)

At a recent industry event, I heard Tom Oldham, Group CFO of Monzo, discuss the UK-based neobank’s international expansion plans. He mentioned that, for Monzo, US expansion is still very much a work in progress, but there was no commitment on any next steps.

In fact Monzo is live in the US, and has been for a number of years with Sutton Bank and Lead Bank as local partners, but marketing has been almost non-existent. You can say that they’re live, yet they haven’t properly launched. There’s been no marketing push, and the Product Market Fit (PMF) that Monzo wants to get right before pushing into the US market at scale is still evolving.

The Financial Times reported this week that Monzo is getting more serious about US expansion, and is seeking a US banking licence:

Monzo is considering a new application for a US banking licence four years after backing out of a previous attempt when it reached an impasse with regulators... Both the OCC and the other US bank regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, have rescinded guidance that had made deals harder to complete.

A US banking license would allow Monzo to operate without its partner banks. This means owning more of the infrastructure and capturing more of the revenue. Monzo’s last attempt to get a full banking license stalled due to the regulatory environment. However under the Trump administration Regulatory guidance has since changed, so this second push may prove to be more fruitful.

There is a belief inside Monzo that what they offer is genuinely different: a unique user experience and a customer engagement model unlike anything else seen in the US so far. Their evidence backs up their ambitions. Consider what Monzo has achieved recently in the UK:

• Monzo won the Marketing Society Brand of the Year 2024, becoming the first fintech or bank to win the prestigious award.

• Monzo has been consistently launching new product innovations. One which has gone under the radar, but is extremely valuable for users, is the ability to undo a payment. An outgoing bank transfer can be reversed within up to one minute of sending. Very useful when research shows that 1 in 10 UK users have accidentally sent money to the wrong person.

• If we go back ten years, Monzo’s customer base mainly used the bank as a secondary account — adding a few hundred pounds here and there to take advantage of the FX-free debit card when travelling. However, many newer customers of Monzo use the bank as their primary account from the get go. An estimated 30-40% of Monzo users now utilise the bank as their main account.

Monzo’s US strategy will be to take what has worked so well for them in the UK, yet localise and find the right PMF for the US market. This is no mean feat. Many have tried and failed. Success means understanding what US consumers expect from a bank while at the same time innovating to draw users in.

The graphic below chat Monzo’s basic US account, its pro account, and accounts from Bank of America and Capital One.

In the US certain things are expected as standard when launching a bank. For instance, Monzo offers FDIC-insured accounts via its partner banks. Whereas in the UK, Monzo’s had no deposit insurance for the first two years, and this was only present once they obtained their full banking license.

Low interchange rates mean that rewards are sparse on debit cards in the UK. In the US interchange is higher. Juicy rewards are the norm. Monzo’s pro account offers 5% cashback with selected merchants, however, it’s only available in two states at this time (Minnesota and Florida). What this illustrates is that Monzo’s US strategy is an iterative one. They are still testing and learning, figuring out what works and doesn’t, and fine-tuning their business model.

This focused approach isn’t new to Monzo, it’s how they started in the UK too. For the first few years of operating Monzo was a London-centric company. This was intentional as a way of staying close to early adopters in a very practical sense. Most users were in London, and the trademark hot coral cards were seen more in the bars of Shoreditch than the pubs of Liverpool.

As well as Monzo, another major neobank made the news this week with their US expansion plans. Nubank has over 110 million customers across Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, and plans to enter the US market via a national banking charter.

Incidentally, there’s an interesting connection between these two US expansion stories. Monzo’s Group CFO Tom Oldham previously worked in a senior position at Nubank. Though unlike Monzo, Nubank is not looking to work with partner banks as a way to get started more quickly. Instead they plan to wait until they get full banking license approval before launching. They’ve already unveiled their US board of directors, which includes Roberto Campos Neto, former President of the Central Bank of Brazil.

Stripe’s reading obsession

Stripe has always been more than a payments company. Back in 2017, co-founder Patrick Collison told Kara Swisher that:

We’ve always viewed Stripe as a multi-decade undertaking. We measure our progress, we talk about this idea of increasing the GDP of the internet, and we measure our progress on that basis.

Patrick’s comment that Stripe is a multi-decade undertaking is notable, especially when we consider that many of Stripe’s competitors — particularly publicly listed companies — operate on a quarter-by-quarter basis (to meet shareholder expectations). I’ve rarely heard other CEOs talk in terms of decades. This can only happen in a founder-led organisation.

Stripe has a book publishing arm called Stripe Press that publishes books related to technological, economic, and scientific advancement. The remit runs quite broad, with books on the classic computer game Prince of Persia, a recent history of AI from Dwarkesh Patel, and a how to guide “Scaling People” from Stripe’s former COO Claire Hughes.

Stripe Press isn’t going to move the needle when it comes to revenue. But the books are gorgeous and look so great that it’d be easy to collect them all, even if you don’t want to read them. The reality is that the Collison brothers have always loved books, and reading shaped their thinking from an early age.

Thomas Yeddou is a ghostwriter for fintech CEOs, and he recently wrote about how books shaped the Collison brothers. He noted that reading was a daily ritual for Patrick and John Collison. Growing up in a small village in Ireland, reading books was a window to the wider world. This voracious reading habit led to their passion for computers, programming, and entrepreneurship.

The brothers’ love of reading shaped Stripe in many ways, as Thomas notes:

That reverence for reading translated into a distinctive writing culture inside Stripe. The brothers insisted on long-form memos and carefully argued proposals. “The first emails I saw from our CEO literally had footnotes,” recalled a former Head of Docs at Stripe in a blog post. “He structured his emails to be like research papers and put the peripheral information at the bottom so as not to detract from the core information.”

Rather than creating lengthy sequences of PowerPoint slides, in Stripe, managers are expected to express opinions in written form. The what and why of requests and decisions should be transparent and well-reasoned. Information is circulated widely, so team members can understand the thought process behind what’s been agreed.

Reading, thinking, and writing all go together in Stripe’s culture.

Further reading: Patrick Collison’s reading list on his personal homepage

Further reading: Ten reading suggestions from Thomas Yeddou

Is BNPL driving a new debt culture?

These days you can Klarna everything from burritos to Coachella tickets. Klarna was initially used for specific use cases — why not buy four t-shirts knowing you’ll send two or three of them back? Because you’ll only pay for what you keep and won’t get charged for all of them upfront. But as I noted in a previous post, BNPL has evolved since its early days, and now nothing is off limits.

A long read in the New York Times Magazine this weekend by Amy X. Wang explores how BNPL has trapped users in a “vortex of debt”. I love this writing style, which brings fintech into the real world, mixing stats and info with actual examples of how payment tech has helped or harmed users in the real world. The article profiles Elysia Berman, who experienced payments cascading across various BNPL purchases:

Each day, Berman woke up to notifications on her phone, announcing how much money was being automatically siphoned out of her bank account. The amounts seemed totally arbitrary — $17 first thing Monday, $250 later that night, $141 Tuesday — with no explanation of what items she was even paying for. She would learn $600 was leaving her account to Sephora or Saks, but she had a hard time finding any easy-to-read tallies of balances on the B.N.P.L. apps.

Many small purchases can soon add up leading to balances in the tens of thousands across different BNPL providers. There’s not just Klarna, but other providers such as Affirm, PayPal, Sezzle, and Zip.

One stat from the article is mind-blowing: BNPL was worth “$120 billion in 2023 in the United States, up from just $2 billion in 2019”, and while Berman had a credit card limit of $2,000, Klarna gave her $12,000 to spend. On one hand, the promise of BNPL is short-term credit at the point of sale for a specific purchase (in some cases, BNPL apps will tell you the maximum amount they will lend). This differs from getting a credit card with a set total limit in advance of shopping . Yet the BNPL model which provisions credit for each purchase, can lead to fragmentation as various providers, by default, collect payments for each purchase individually.

Regulation is tightening and in the US some BNPL providers will soon integrate credit scores into their decisioning, but it’s not mandatory. This is one big gap between BNPL and traditional credit. When a user applies for a credit card, lenders can see the outstanding balances across other providers in their credit history, whereas this isn’t the case for BNPL so far.

What I liked about the article was how it anchored a story about payments in the real world, and highlighted how BNPL has provided an artificial lifestyle boost to consumers who don’t feel they are taking on debt. It’s a couple of clicks or taps at checkout and BNPL providers do everything possible to make conversion from online shopping to payment as easy as possible.

BNPL isn’t going anywhere — consumers like the product. The momentum is such that banks like Citi, Chase, along with American Express, now offer products that resemble BNPL. These products typically split payments into equal instalments. Yet the story of BNPL is one that highlights how regulation needs to keep up and adapt. It shouldn’t be possible for consumers to ratchet up way more debt with BNPL than would be possible on a credit card.

It’s an irony that BNPL was supposed to make it easier to take on short-term debt at low risk, yet in this case, it led to much larger long-term debt, with Berman losing track of her various payments. Such cases suggest the BNPL model needs refinement. Do consumers need better tools to track how debt across multiple providers racks up?

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Note that views expressed on this Substack are my own and do not represent any other organisation. Also nothing I say should be taken as investment advice.

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