My Most Read Posts of 2025

What resonated and why

Welcome to Payments Culture!

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.

Raining With Ideas for New Writing

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

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.