If my career had gone to plan would I be writing this?
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:
Regulation explains why on a like-for-like basis Revolut cannot compete with Amex.
Culture explains why credit cards have never taken off in Germany.
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.
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
Best wishes. Hope one day you can tell us about a way to remit money without any transaction cost.