Every payment you make is a small performance. A tap at the till, a transfer, a fill-up at the pump. Behind each one sits an orchestra of banks, card schemes, regulators and rules, each playing its own part and not always from the same score.
I’ve spent 28 years in that orchestra pit, building card and payment products and arguing over who pays when things go wrong. This newsletter is where I write about what I see from inside the machine.
Three questions run through everything here:
Who really pays?
Who decides?
And how does it end up in your wallet?
Recent pieces on LinkedIn have looked at offline card payments and who holds the loss, the fight over post-Brexit card fees, stablecoins being absorbed by the card networks, and why your fuel pump stops at £99. The newsletter takes those threads further, in longer pieces with more room for the numbers.
The first issue arrives on Thursday 5 November. It’s about the party that ends up holding the bill whenever payments go wrong, and why that keeps happening.
Subscribe free below, and it will come straight to your inbox.
Dirk
Views are my own and not those of any employer, past or present.