Payments Experts

I'll help you decrease processing fees by 20%, and improve approval rates, guaranteed — or your money back. 

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Founder & CEO

Shift4 Europe (formerly Finaro)

Director Of Sales & Business Development

• Leading the technical engagement with customers and partners to ensure that the functionality, performance, services, and technical infrastructure are clearly understood and executed.
• Identify & build customized solutions for strategic customers and managing their delivery
• Actively involved in analysis, solution design, client communication, and implementation
• Close collaboration with different internal teams (such as Product, R&D, sales, marketing, operations & support)

Solution Architect

Hey-CPA

Hey-CPA offers a CPA as-a-service platform, automating Bookkeeping work.
• As a CTO I was responsible for all technology aspects: software development, specification, design, architecture, infrastructure, and implementation.
• Built the code and the product from the ground up to be scalable and user-friendly.
• Product presentation, Sales & Recruitment of new businesses.
• Engaging customers, to continuously collect feedback and improve the product.

Co-founder & CTO

Isracard

• Project leader and coordinator, achieving success through collaboration with multiple departments, including R&D, Product Managers, Sales & Marketing.
• Responsible for Business Development, partner success, and Go-to-Market strategy.
• Maintaining positive relationships with business partners and customers to ensure adoption success.

Technology Project Leader (Product Owner)

Wix.com

• Working with the most cutting edge methodologies and technologies to develop ground-breaking web platforms, optimized for performance and scale - Wix platform - which is used by millions of people around the globe every day to build websites. 
• Understand and leverage customers business challenges to expand revenue and increase usage rate.
• Worked in a small team, that follows agile work methods and use continuous integration/deployment methodologies to run quickly as a startup while maintaining the high-end quality of the product.

Web Developer at Wix.com

Touche

• Work in a cross-functional team to deliver a complete user experience.
• Development of full projects, client and server-side - from specification and UI to the stage deployment on the servers.
• Expert in JavaScript and Web development.
• Presented the company and its technology at conventions and trade shows all over the world.

Full Stack Developer

ClickSoftware

• Helped enterprises and SMBs solve workforce management obstacles using ClickSoftware products
• Worked closely with customers and partners, onsite and remotely, to ensure the successful launch of new products.

Solution Specialist

Ness Technologies

Software Development Instructor

RE4MA Group SL

Direct Retail in shopping centers
• Extensive experience in frontal sales, Retail activities, brands development.
• Managed the sales organization (120 employees) in 27 locations globally.
• Responsibility for the Go-To-Market strategy and sales plan.

Sales and Product Line Manager

The Payment Solutions Guy — I'll help you decrease processing fees by 20%, and improve approval rates (guaranteed) by finding the best Payment Providers for your business | Visit my website to learn how

We help companies struggling with difficulty finding the right payment solution, high transaction fees, low approval rates, hidden fees to decrease processing fees by 20% and improve approval rates by 5-10%.

Using our unique Discovery & Assessment process, Payments Strategy, Cost Optimization, and Increase Approval Rates steps from day one. 

If we cannot achieve these results, we will continue to work with our clients for free until we do.

Alan Brian Dardic

🚨 Payments is Changing at an Unprecedented Rate. I Help Companies Navigate It.

Most payments companies struggle with navigating complex global payment landscapes, from startups that are trying to define where they fit, to legacy acquirers, who are trying to fight back to the emergence of Fintechs.

They either:
❌ Aren't able to connect with new and fast-growing merchants.
❌ Fail to differentiate in a saturated market.
❌ Rely on outdated strategies that no longer work.

That’s where I come in.

For the last 20 years, I’ve worked with some of the biggest names in Payments (Adyen, Checkout, and over 50 of the top 150 Nilson acquirers, PSPs, and fintechs). 

I’ve helped payments companies:
✅ Define their Strategy to unlock new opportunities and products
✅ Scale across Europe, the U.S., and emerging markets
✅ Raise Capital to expand their capabilities and get to Product Market Fit

In 2018, I started DataBright, a payments analytics consultancy, and helped 50+ fintechs before selling it to a global data company. 

Now, I work directly with PSPs, Acquirers, and Fintech founders to scale their payments business and stay ahead of the curve.

How I Can Help You
💡 Payments Strategy & Optimization: Build a payments stack that reduces costs & increases approvals.
🔍 Advisory for PSPs & Acquirers: Market positioning, GTM strategy, and performance optimization.
🎤 Keynote Speaker & Thought Leadership: Insights on the future of payments, fintech, and scaling businesses.

📩 Want to talk? DM me or reach out to discuss how we can work together.

Dwayne Gefferie

Why Global Payments Inc.' Worldpay Acquisition is really a Go-To-Market bet.

Global Payments Inc. has now closed the Worldpay acquisition and divested its Issuer Solutions business.

Like many of you, I was eager to find out what their strategy will be going forward.

So instead of guessing, I spent the last 24 hours diving through every single document and press release I could get my hands on, to try to extract what I believe their strategy will be. 

This is what I think (my opinion only).

They’re positioning the company as a pure-play commerce solutions provider.

While most might focus on scale, they now have 6M+ merchant locations, about $3.7T in annual payment volume, roughly 94B transactions, and operations in 175+ countries, the fine print actually reveals a lot more.

The plan is HOW they sell, and WHAT they standardize.

They’ve said they’ll go to market through three channels: Enterprise, SMB, and Integrated & Platforms.

Each gets tailored sales strategies and its own product direction.

A strategy that doesn't seem to be focused on optics, but rather, a purposeful analysis as to where the market is going, while at the same time avoiding the "unification" of them on paper.

Just think about it...

Enterprise buyers want coverage, reliability, and zero surprises.

SMB wants simplicity, fast onboarding, and low cost to serve.

Platforms want developer speed, clean APIs, and an embedded experience that feels native, not bolted on.

Saying you will do all this in one company quickly becomes unbelievable; separate brands with separate focuses make a lot more sense.

The make-or-break move is Integrated & Platforms.

If it becomes the bridge between Worldpay’s enterprise footprint and Global Payments Inc.’ SMB engine, this could turn into a distribution story, not just a processing story.

Done right, platforms become the place merchants start and expand, without switching providers as they outgrow the first plan.

But that only works if the underlying product is shared.

If Enterprise runs one stack, SMB runs another, and Platforms becomes a “special projects” unit, you don’t get one company. You get three silos and one logo, plus a lot of meetings.

They also said they’ll invest over $1B annually to drive innovation.

The real test is whether that investment lands on shared capabilities that every channel can ship, sell, and support: acceptance performance, risk controls, reconciliation, payouts, and the tooling that makes integration and operations seamless, not a struggle.

As we have seen several Mega-Mergers being reversed due to a lack of strategy and direction, the Global Payments Inc. and Worldpay team seems to be intentional about what they want, and if they can execute on it well, I wouldn't be surprised if they win in all three categories.

The Payments Strategist | The Future of Payments Is Changing. I Help Payments Companies & Acquirers Stay Ahead.

Why Worldpay's Solving Agentic Commerce's Trust Problem

Every major payment company shipped AI shopping protocols in 2025.

Google rolled out Agent Payments with 60+ partners. Mastercard introduced Agent Pay. Visa followed with Intelligent Commerce.

All beautiful engineering. All designed for fully autonomous AI shoppers.

Then, Worldpay surveyed 8,000 consumers across seven countries to see if anyone actually wanted this.

The data revealed something the protocols missed entirely.

Forty percent of shoppers would let AI browse on their behalf. Compare prices, find deals, surface options. Among younger consumers, that number climbs to 45%.

But only 6% want AI to complete purchases without approval.

That 34-point gap isn't a temporary hesitation. It's the entire market telling you what needs to be built.

The problem isn't that consumers don't trust AI...

It's that the infrastructure doesn't exist to make AI trustworthy at the point that matters most.

67% worry that an agent will buy the wrong thing.
54% demand fraud protection designed for agents, not humans.
60% need to review transactions before completion, and 
58% won't trust any system without 24-hour cancellation rights.

These aren't feature requests. They're adoption requirements.

Here's what makes Worldpay's approach different.

They're not trying to eliminate the approval step through better AI. They're building the orchestration layer that makes approval feel seamless. Real-time workflows that don't create friction. Fraud systems that operate at agent speed. Identity verification that doesn't break the buying flow.

The protocols solved message formats. Worldpay's solving the trust gap that sits between browsing and buying.

Because that's where the multi-billion-dollar opportunity actually lies. Not in 2030 autonomy, but in 2027 adoption.

The companies building for what consumers want today will capture the market before those building for what they think consumers will want eventually.

I wrote a newsletter breaking down Worldpay’s Agentic Commerce report, titled Agentic Adoption.

Get your copy here -> https://lnkd.in/eVWr44hm

Or download Worldpay's Agentic Commerce Report directly and break it down for yourself: https://lnkd.in/e_PDUAR9

The infrastructure that wins won't be the one with the smartest agent...

It'll be the one people actually trust.

Do you want to get started working in payments?

I've been in this industry for over 20 years.

I started in Credit Card Issuing back in the early 2000's, during my freshman year in University. 

I started as a Data Analyst, and eventually became a Data Scientist, Head of Data, VP of Data Science & Analytics, before becoming a Payments Strategist.

What I can tell you from experience is that to work in payments, you need to understand how money actually moves, master at least one technical skill deeply, and learn to translate complex systems into business value.

Here's the one tip I'd give you:

Pick one payment flow and understand it completely.

Not superficially. Not "I read an article about it" understanding. I mean, trace every single step from end to end.

Take a card transaction. Follow it from the moment someone taps their card to when the money hits the merchant's account.

Learn what happens at the gateway, the processor, the card network, the issuer. 

Understand why it sometimes fails. Know what every response code means.

Figure out where the fees come from: interchange, scheme fees, markups, etc.

This sounds basic. It's not.

Most people in payments have a fuzzy understanding of how things work.

They know their piece but not the whole chain.
They can explain authorization, but not settlement.
They understand fraud checks but not how 3DS actually works.

That makes them replaceable.

When you understand the full flow, everything else clicks into place.

Authorization optimization makes sense because you know where transactions fail.

Routing logic becomes obvious because you understand the cost structure.

You can spot problems others miss because you know what normal looks like.

I was fortunate enough to work on building multiple acquiring processing engines from the ground up. Nobody knew exactly what we had to build, so I took it upon myself to go through every single scheme manual there is. 

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay International, Discover, JCB International (Europe) Ltd., the whole lot. 

For each one, I figured out exactly how everything worked, line by line.

That foundation carried me through every role since.

When I needed to build analytics platforms, I knew what data mattered.
When I advised on payment strategy, I could see the second-order effects.
When I started consulting, I could diagnose problems faster than people who'd been in payments longer.

Don't try to learn everything about payments at once. Learn one thing completely. Then learn the next thing.

And here's the exciting part: while card payments are decades old, new payment methods keep emerging. Wero from EPI Company, Brazilian Pix, stablecoins from Circle, Paxos, or Tether.io, National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI)'s UPI, and many more.

Every payments company needs someone who understands them deeply. Someone needs to build the infrastructure around them.

That could be you.

"What early career mistakes will you never make again?"

I was asked this on a Worldpay panel several weeks ago. While I gave a smart answer, it required more thought.

Here are 5 mistakes from my 20+ year career in payments, analytics, and strategy that I hope you can avoid.

Mistake 1: Solving problems before building skills

In my first role as a data scientist, I obsessed over improving our authorization rate. A crucial goal, but the wrong priority for a new employee.

I should've been mastering SQL instead of limping through queries. Learning Python instead of R, which works in academia but dies in production. Getting good at data visualization, because results are worthless if you can't tell the story.

You can't solve hard problems without the toolkit first.

Mistake 2: Running experiments without productizing them

At Adyen, I ran experiments constantly. They piled up in folders, forgotten.
Then a product guy showed up. He took everything I'd built, gave it names, and turned it into actual product features.

He got the glory. I got the lesson: building matters less than shipping what people can use.

Mistake 3: Thinking consulting is just your day job with better rates

Every year, talented people leave jobs for consulting without realizing it requires completely different skills.

You need to attract clients, diagnose their problems, craft a strategy, and give them actionable steps. Only when that resonates will they hire you.

This isn't managing a role with time and resources. It's a different game entirely.

Mistake 4: Chasing hype instead of riding waves
AI this quarter, blockchain last year, whatever's next by summer.

Hype fades. Waves persist.

The question isn't what's trending. It's what fundamental shift will matter in five years, and whether you're positioned to ride it.

Mistake 5: Not sharing what I was working on

In the last two years, I've shared more publicly than in the previous twenty. Writing, videos, webinars.

These skills compound.

Share your insights and perspectives online instead of keeping everything internal.

I wish I'd started 20 years ago.

Want to make sure you have the latest insights in Payments Strategy, subscribe to my newsletter https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

The Number 1 Question I Am Getting From Enterprise Merchants Is: 

"How do we prepare for AI agents making purchases without breaking our payment infrastructure?"

The shift to agentic commerce is happening faster than most payment leaders realize.

AI agents aren't waiting for legacy systems to catch up. They're already negotiating, purchasing, and transacting autonomously.

Google's AP2, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Agent Pay, and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol are live, and merchants need to adapt now.

But here's the problem most payment teams are facing:
Traditional payment stacks weren't designed for autonomous transactions.

- When an AI agent initiates a payment, who's liable?
- How do you validate trust?
- How do you maintain control while enabling automation?

That's exactly why IXOPAY and I are hosting a webinar on February 11th, 2026.

We're cutting through the hype to focus on two critical pillars every merchant needs:

1. AI Payments Intelligence Using AI to analyze and standardize payment data so you can recognize agent-driven transactions, optimize processing, and stay compliant as agent activity scales.

2. Universal Tokens Building payment architecture that maintains control and adaptability, so you're not locked into a single provider when agents start routing transactions.

And much more...

Our goal is not to give a theoretical talk about it, but rather to provide the audience with real, practical frameworks for payment, risk, and commerce, so that leaders who want to adopt agent payments can do so without introducing unnecessary operational risk.

Joining me on the panel are:
Jill Willard (CTO, IXOPAY)
Marco Conte (Founder, Congrify)
Philip Andrew Sjogren (Moderator, IXOPAY)

If you're building payment infrastructure for the next 3-5 years, this session will show you exactly what to prioritize.

Join us, and save your seat right now, and prepare any questions you might have for us: https://lnkd.in/eG9gGwbF

Why Checkout.com Wants To Be a US Acquirer

Most “payment performance” claims are capped by one simple fact: who actually holds the acquiring relationship.

Checkout.com just announced it received approval for a Georgia Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank charter. As they stated, they are working toward operating as their own US acquirer in 2026, with direct card network integration and greater control over the stack.

That matters because the US is where payments companies go to either get serious, or get exposed.

In many US setups today, processors rely on a partner bank to serve as the scheme member and merchant acquirer, and then build on top of that.

Checkout.com’s public terms name Cross River Bank in that role for certain arrangements. Owning the acquiring seat reduces dependencies, removes an extra layer of margin, and lets you settle merchants directly.

I’ve built US acquiring the “sponsored” way first, through BIN sponsorships such as Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank. It works, and it gets you live. It also means settlement mechanics, risk posture, and change velocity are never fully yours.

Becoming your own acquirer is not a shortcut.

Interchange and scheme rules are messier than most decks admit, and in an optimization-driven market, you need best-in-class routing, retries, data enrichment, and dispute operations to earn the right to claim better auth rates.

But if you get it right, the upside is real.

You can design for enterprise and B2B from the ground up, support Level 2 and Level 3 data properly, run more nuanced MCC setups, and tune acceptance without negotiating every lever with a sponsor.

But here is the challenge most acquirers seem to forget...in the U.S., your acquiring reputation matters more than anywhere else. 

New acquirers often take an auth-rate hit until issuers learn to trust their signals.

The question isn’t whether Checkout.com can connect directly. It’s whether their tech and operating discipline can outperform the issuer bias that legacy acquiring brands have spent decades building.

Either way, an interesting move that, given their $300 billion in annual processing volume and their Market Follower Strategy, was to be expected.

For more in-depth Payments Strategy, check out my newsletter https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

Why a Payments Company Needs To Be More than just a Checkout

Your competitor just copied your checkout flow. Now what?

Most PSPs pour resources into the checkout layer. Better UX, faster tokenization, smoother card vaulting, one-click everything. It's where founders demo, where sales teams point, where VCs nod.

It's also the layer competitors clone in six weeks.

Here's the part nobody wants to hear. If your differentiation lives in the UI, you don't have a moat. You have a countdown timer.

The companies winning in 2026 aren't winning on checkout features. They're winning on distribution channels, risk operations, and cost-to-serve discipline.

The stuff that doesn't screenshot well but compounds over years.

Take tokenization as an example.

For a generic PSP, it's a checkbox feature. For a PSP whose strategy is performance, it's a lever that moves approval rates through credential quality and lifecycle management. 

Same feature. Different strategic weight.

Or stablecoin settlement.

One PSP adds it to their landing page. Another uses it to rewrite their treasury economics and cut two days off merchant payouts. Same tech. Entirely different meaning.

This gap is even starker for PayFacs. Your moat isn't the payments tech. It's underwriting, monitoring, and operations at scale. If you're building everything for the merchant dashboard but neglecting your risk engine, you're optimizing the wrong layer.

The checkout layer is the standard. Everyone can build a decent one now. The question is what happens after the transaction goes through.

- Can you onboard 500 merchants a week without your ops team collapsing? 
- Can you spot fraud patterns before they cost you your banking relationship? 
- Can you keep cost-to-serve low while competitors hire humans to patch their broken workflows?

That's where real separation happens. That's where copying takes years, not weeks.

If your entire strategy can be cloned in a product sprint, you don't have a strategy. You have a feature list.

The companies that survive the next wave of price compression won't be the ones with the prettiest checkout. They'll be the ones who built systems that work under stress.

Distribution that compounds. Risk engines that scale. Operations that don't require heroics every quarter.

That's not back office work. That's the business model.

P.S. I break down these strategies and more in my newsletter, feel free to check it out https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

Everyone in payments is avoiding this conversation.

But it's costing the entire industry billions in wasted engineering hours.

Watch the clip. 👇

Hard skills get you hired.

But soft skills get you promoted.

I went from data scientist to payments strategist in 10 years, working across companies such as Adyen and Checkout.com, to now working with major payment platforms and tech companies like Worldpay, Mastercard, and NVIDIA.

Here are 3 soft skills that made a difference in my career, which can benefit you too:

1. Explaining complexity simply

Early in my career, I'd present analysis loaded with statistical terms and technical jargon.

The work was solid. The impact was zero.

The breakthrough came when I learned to explain concepts such as authorization rates, interchange, scheme-fee logic, and surcharging to executives who'd never needed to go through scheme manuals to develop a new acquiring platform.

Strip away the complexity.

Focus on what changes and why it matters.

If your audience doesn't understand it, you haven't done your job. This skill alone doubled my influence inside every company I worked at.

2. Diagnosing problems, not just fixing symptoms

Most people jump straight to solutions. That's why most initiatives fail.

I learned to slow down and follow these simple 3-steps to develop a strategy

1. Diagnose what's actually broken, not what people think is broken. 

2. Create a guiding policy that makes sense for the situation.

3. Then design coherent actions that follow from that policy.

This framework, whether I was optimizing payment flows or building analytics platforms, separated good work from work that actually moved the business forward.

It's also what got me promoted. Managers value people who solve the right problems.

3. Balancing what the company needs with what you need to learn

Here's the tension nobody talks about: you need to deliver for your employer while developing skills for your future.

I made this work by choosing projects where both aligned.

When I was improving a processing platform, I had to find insights in petabytes' worth of data; a simple pivot table in Excel wouldn't suffice, so I had to learn to use SQL with Python and systematize my analysis.

Because of that, I found problems faster and solved them before bringing them to anyone's attention.

Using that same process, I advanced to leveraging data warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks, analytics tools like Looker, and eventually laid the foundation for Machine Learning Platforms across multiple acquirers.

Those skills continue to serve me to this day as I work with major Payments companies, developing their strategies to make the leap from just processing payments to becoming a AI-Driven payments company.

So don't see it as stealing time from the company; instead, think of it as you're making yourself more valuable to the company while getting better at your craft.

This is a win-win scenario that no HR department or Manager can say no to.

P.S. If you want to learn more about the Strategies I develop, check out my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

Why Acquirers Will Need a Multi-Stablecoin Strategy

Yesterday, Tether.io launched USAT, their US-regulated stablecoin. It's now live through Anchorage Digital Bank, fully compliant under the US GENIUS Act.

While many are focusing on how this will impact their competitor Circle, I like to look at it from a different angle.

What just happened is BIGGER.

Circle's only sustainable advantage just disappeared.

For years, Circle positioned USDC as the compliant choice in the US. Tether.io operated offshore. 

For banks, networks, and acquirers wanting/needing regulatory cover, they had no choice but to go with USDC. Now, that moat is gone.

USAT operates under the same federal framework as USDC. Same reserve requirements. Same oversight. Same compliance standards.

Now we have three credible, regulated, liquid stablecoins: USDC at $75B, USDT at $186B globally, and USAT with direct interoperability to Tether's liquidity pool.

However, more are coming.

Fiserv launched FIUSD. PayPal has PYUSD (powered by Paxos's USDP). And many banks including Revolut are building their own.

The GENIUS Act didn't pick winners. It opened the door for everyone.

Stablecoin issuance is commoditizing. Fast.

This creates a problem for acquirers who built single-stablecoin settlement rails.

Merchants will start asking questions you can't answer with one token: 

Which stablecoin has the best liquidity for my corridor?
Which has the lowest conversion cost? 
Can I accept USDT from customers and settle in USAT domestically?

Acquirers who respond with "we only support USDC" just became bottlenecks, not enablers.

The parallel here is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon didn't wait to see if Linux or Microsoft Windows would win. They built infrastructure supporting both. The value wasn't picking the winner. It was providing the orchestration layer that made any choice seamless.

That's where acquirers need to position. Not betting on Circle or Tether.io, but building the infrastructure that makes every compliant stablecoin useful.

This isn't about being neutral. It's about being essential.

The economics favor orchestration over issuance. Your value scales with stablecoin proliferation, not despite it. Every new token that launches increases demand for infrastructure that handles multi-coin complexity.

The companies that win won't be the ones who issued the most stablecoins.

They'll be the ones who built the settlement layer that works with all of them.

USAT's launch proves we're in the infrastructure phase, not the issuance phase.

The question isn't which stablecoin to support. It's whether you'll build the orchestration layer that captures economics across all of them, or get disintermediated by someone who does.

To learn more about Stablecoin's Infrastructure moment, check out this in-depth newsletter I wrote about it for free... https://lnkd.in/ePHnB6kW

Why Stripe Is Building The Monetization Layer For AI, Not Just Processing Payments

Most payments companies still talk as if the product is “processing”.

Stripe is betting the product is monetization.

A great example is Stripe's customer story with Swedish Unicorn Lovable (published on The Paypers), an AI software creation platform, where Stripe is positioned as the default way Lovable users get paid, subscriptions, and usage-based billing included.

What started out as a way for Lovable to accept subscriptions turned into them using Stripe's Atlas to set up a US entity, and now using their usage-based billing.

On top of that, Lovable makes it very clear in their documentation that they prefer Stripe as the processor for their clients' applications through their Stripe Connector.

The same day, Stripe announced it completed its acquisition of Metronome, a billing platform built for complex usage-based models.

That combination isn’t a coincidence; it’s a market approach.

Here’s the strategy hiding in plain sight.

1. Go where new businesses are born
Lovable is making it possible for anyone to ship a product fast. When “build” becomes easy, “get paid” becomes the bottleneck. Stripe wants to sit exactly at that bottleneck.

2. Make AI business models feel native
AI products don’t price like SaaS. They need subscriptions plus metering, credits, overages, thresholds, proration, and clean revenue reporting when spend is variable. Stripe is explicitly building around these patterns. 

3. Buy the hard part of monetization
Metronome’s whole value is orchestrating usage-based billing at scale. Stripe didn’t acquire more processing volume; it acquired pricing and billing infrastructure that AI companies struggle to build in-house.

This is what other payments companies should take from it.

Entry-level merchants are high-margin but high-attrition. If you want that bracket, you don’t win it with a sales team. You win by being embedded in the creation tools and by owning the end-to-end monetization workflow.

Nowadays, processing is the standard.

The monetization layer is the moat.

The real question we should be asking ourselves is, could Lovable become the next big Embedded Payments Platform, like Shopify?

Personally, I don't think so, as that would require owning onboarding, risk/compliance, and pricing, and taking a platform cut on payment volume, which seems counter to what they are building. 

But then again, with all that Stripe offers (Stripe Connect, Managed Payments, etc.), anything is possible.

If you’re a PSP or acquirer watching Stripe do this, the real question is simple.

Are you still just selling payments, or are you building what businesses use to make money?

Want a Primer on Payments Business Models? Get it here -> https://lnkd.in/eVmGH-Mx

Why the UK Just Reopened the Fight Over UK–EEA Online Interchange Fees

For years, “post-Brexit fees are higher” has been treated like a fact of life.

This week, the UK High Court signaled it doesn’t have to be.

On 15 January 2026, Visa, Mastercard, and Revolut lost a High Court challenge against the UK Payments Systems Regulator (PSR).

Not on economics.

On power.

The court said the Payment Systems Regulator has the legal authority to pursue a cap on UK–EEA cross-border interchange fees for online card payments.

If you’re wondering why this matters, start with what changed after Brexit.

When UK–EEA transactions fell outside the EU’s interchange caps, online cross-border rates rose sharply. The figures often cited are around 1.5% for credit and 1.15% for debit on these flows.

That delta doesn’t show up as a line item called “Brexit tax.”

It shows up as higher acceptance costs for UK merchants selling into Europe, and a bigger revenue pool for issuers that sit on the other side of the interchange equation.

The PSR’s view is simple.

These fees went up because they could, not because costs went up, and UK businesses are paying materially more each year as a result.

So the regulator moved toward a cap.

And the schemes and a major interchange-dependent fintech tried to stop it before it even got to the number.

That’s the real significance of this ruling.

It doesn’t set the cap.

It removes the “you can’t do that” defense.

Now the conversation shifts to the parts that will actually move money.

What transactions are in scope?

How the cap is calculated?

How quickly it’s implemented?

Whether there’s any attempt to appeal.

For acquirers and PSPs, this is not just a regulatory footnote.

If UK–EEA online interchange is capped, pricing models, merchant steerage conversations, and cross-border acceptance economics all get recalibrated.

For issuers and fintechs, it’s a reminder that interchange is not a guaranteed annuity. It’s a policy variable.

The market didn’t get simpler this week.

It got more contested.

P.S. If you run pricing, routing, or commercial strategy for UK merchants selling into the EEA, this is one of those rulings you read twice.

P.P.S. Want to build a predictive interchange calculator for your acquiring business, to keep track of the changes, I've built several, and explain it here for free https://lnkd.in/e3xx_waN

Everyone Thinks Crypto Cards Are Disrupting Payments. They're Not.

They're building something more interesting.

Parallel dollar rails in markets where traditional finance doesn't work.

Mastercard and Visa now run 130+ crypto card programs globally. That's $18 billion in annualized volume as of late 2025. While most would say this about competing with traditional cards in New York and London, in actuality, it's something else.

For example, let's take a person in Argentina who holds USDC, not because it's easier, but because they are trying to protect savings from 200%+ inflation. 

She spends it at a local shop using a crypto card. The merchant gets pesos. The cardholder protects value.

Traditional card networks excel in stable currency zones with mature banking infrastructure. But they struggle in markets with capital controls, currency volatility, and fragmented banking access.

Crypto cards solve a different problem.

They provide dollar-denominated purchasing power without requiring a US bank account. They bypass local currency depreciation. They work 24/7 regardless of banking hours.

Both Mastercard and Visa are moving into this space, and it's not just for defensive purposes. They're using crypto rails to reach markets that traditional infrastructure couldn't serve efficiently.

The networks capture interchange. Users get dollar stability. Merchants get local currency.

This matters for three reasons.

First, addressable market expansion. 

Billions of people in unstable currency markets want access to dollars but can't get traditional cards. Crypto rails unlock that demand.

Second, infrastructure reuse.

Card networks don't need to rebuild acceptance. Merchants don't need new terminals. The innovation sits at settlement, not checkout.

Third, complementarity. 

Traditional cards dominate developed markets. Crypto cards create new volume in underpenetrated geographies. Both grow simultaneously.

The question isn't whether crypto will disrupt payments. It's whether incumbents capture the upside from new markets that blockchain makes accessible.

They're not running from crypto. They're using it to extend networks into geographies traditional infrastructure couldn't reach at scale.

This isn't a zero-sum battle. It's growing the pie.

Why NVIDIA's AI Report Reveals 42% of Payment Companies Are Betting on Agentic AI.

Agentic AI isn't another payments buzzword. It's a competitive moat in the making.

NVIDIA's State of AI in Financial Services report surveyed 800+ industry professionals. One number stands out for payment operations.

42% of institutions are already using or assessing agentic AI. Within that group, 21% have already deployed AI agents into production.

They're not piloting chatbots. They're rebuilding payment infrastructure.

Here's what the data reveals about what these companies are actually doing.

The top use case for AI agents is knowledge management and retrieval at 56%. Second is internal process optimization at 52%.

For payments, that translates to autonomous transaction routing, dynamic retry logic, and real-time network optimization. Decisions made in under 200 milliseconds that rule-based systems can't match.

The ROI numbers explain why they're moving fast.

89% of respondents said AI is both increasing revenue and decreasing costs.
64% saw revenue increases greater than 5%. 
29% saw increases of 10% or more.

For a payment processor handling $10B in annual volume, a two percentage point improvement in authorization rates delivers $50M in additional captured revenue. At 2.5% merchant fees.

But the multiplier effect goes beyond top-line revenue.

52% cite operational efficiency as AI's biggest impact. 
48% point to improvements in employee productivity.

That means fewer engineers need to manage retry logic trees.
No manual network selection.
Real-time adaptation to issuer signals without human intervention.

Every basis point improvement in authorization rates flows straight to revenue.
Every millisecond of reduced decision latency compounds across millions of transactions.

The 42% betting on agentic AI understand something critical. Authorization optimization isn't a feature. It's a revenue recapture strategy with immediate, measurable ROI.

The infrastructure exists today. 84% say open source is important to their AI strategy. The tools are accessible.

The question isn't whether agentic AI works for payment operations. The early adopters already have their answer.

The question is how long you can compete with static routing rules while competitors make decisions at machine speed.

Get your own copy of NVIDIA's report here: https://lnkd.in/ehQ9n92W

NVIDIA State of AI Report Insights

The Payments Strategy Lens Selector: Why Most Frameworks Fail

Payments teams collect strategy frameworks like pokémon cards.

They bookmark articles on Jobs to Be Done. They save Wardley Mapping decks. Someone mentions unit economics, and it goes on the list.

Then a real decision arrives: Should we build fraud decisioning or partner? Should we push A2A in Germany or double down on cards?

The frameworks sit unused. The team argues from gut feel. Six months later, they've built something expensive that doesn't move the business.

After 23 years working in and advising PSPs, I've seen this pattern destroy companies with brilliant teams and strong capital. The issue isn't that frameworks don't work.

It's that teams use the wrong framework for the problem they're solving.
Part 1 of this series ("Why Payments Strategy Matters")

It argued that 2026 will separate strategists from wishful thinkers as AI agents, tokenization, stablecoins, and modern rails converge.

Part 2 ("Payments Strategy Cascade") showed that coverage isn't strategy. The PSP playbook of adding geographies and methods leads to margin compression. You need coherent choices about where you play and how you win.

This is Part 3. The HOW.

- How to choose when options multiply. 
- How to avoid building everything and owning nothing. 
- How to turn frameworks from theoretical models into actual decisions.

Inside this edition, I break down:

- The five questions every payments strategy decision collapses into
- Nine frameworks mapped to payments-native problems (Job Chains, Unit - Economics Waterfall, Control Points, Wardley Mapping, Unbundling/Rebundling, Strategy as Constraints, Platform Strategy, Two-Speed, Trust Stack)
- When to use each framework, what it produces, and how teams misuse it
- The four lens traps that derail payments companies (Coverage, Optimization, Platform, Consensus)
- A complete worked example: Should we push A2A in Germany? (showing five frameworks applied in sequence)

The difference between having a strategy and having a deck

Here's what I've learned:

You don't need more frameworks. You need selection discipline.

If you can't name which question you're trying to answer, the framework becomes wallpaper. Pretty to look at. Useless in practice.

The teams that win don't know more frameworks. 

- They choose better. 
- They use the right lens for the problem. 
- They resist traps. 
- They make fewer decisions, but the decisions compound.

That's selection discipline.
Frameworks don't make the choice for you. 

They make the choice clear.

7,000+ payments professionals across 89 countries are using this three-part series to sharpen their strategic thinking. 

Don't build for another quarter without reading this.

Read the full breakdown here → https://lnkd.in/e6432PRV

Why “Coverage” Isn’t A Strategy for PSPs, PayFacs And Acquirers

Most PSPs can explain their roadmap. They can't explain their strategy.

Over 23 years in payments, I've seen this pattern repeat: companies chase "coverage" like it's a competitive advantage, adding payment methods, launching dashboards, and expanding geographies.

Then they wake up with an impressive product that sells at an unimpressive margin.

I've worked in and with companies such as Adyen, Checkout.com, and dozens of PSPs across four continents.

Here's what I've learned: the traditional PSP playbook is broken.

Payments got cheaper. Complexity did not.

When you can buy "good enough" acquiring from half the market, you don't win by adding more "good enough." You win by being meaningfully better at one system that compounds.

That's the entire game.

Last week, the newsletter the "Why Payments Strategy Matters" was read over 10,000 times. This week is the companion piece - the HOW.

I've adapted Playing to Win, one of the cleanest strategy frameworks I know, and translated it into acquiring reality:

The Five Strategic Choices:
- Winning Aspiration (not "we want to grow")
- Where to Play (not your TAM)
- How to Win (not a feature list)
- Must-Have Capabilities (not twenty things)
- Management Systems (how strategy survives Q2)

Most PSPs try to differentiate in the checkout layer. That's the layer competitors can copy the fastest.

PayFacs win or lose in distribution, risk, and operations. That's where the compounding happens.

In this edition, I break down:

- The Acquiring Layer Cake (where you compete determines if you race to the bottom)
- The five advantage archetypes (distribution, risk, performance, economics, speed)
- Why commoditization happens when innovation only changes the checkout layer

A complete worked example: the vertical SaaS PayFac strategy for field services
The one-page template you can fill out this week

Here's the uncomfortable truth:

If your aspiration doesn't make you uncomfortable, it's probably not a choice.
If a competitor with more capital copied your product in six months, what would still be true about why you win? 

That's your strategy.

Visa has provisioned 12.6 billion network tokens.
Stablecoins processed $26 trillion in on-chain volume. 
AI agents moved from demos to production.

By 2030, the separation will be complete. Companies with coherent strategies will compound advantages. Companies chasing every trend will compound costs.

Coverage is optional. Choices aren't.

7,000+ payments professionals across 89 countries received this strategy breakdown this morning.

Don't get left behind.

Read the full breakdown here → https://lnkd.in/eWDC8VSv

Contactless is no longer a feature in Europe; it’s the default.

In the first half of 2025, the euro area processed 29.6 billion contactless card payments at the point of sale.

That’s up 12.8% year on year. The value hit €0.8 trillion, up 13.9%.

Contactless now represents 83% of in-person card transactions, and 67% of in-person card spend.

This isn’t a story about cards growing while POS shrinks. POS is still the workhorse.

Total card payments reached 44.0 billion in six months, up 9.6%. Of those, 81% were non-remote transactions, and they accounted for 70% of total card value.

We love talking about e-commerce because the levers are obvious. Checkout, routing, fraud, retries, wallets, all the fun stuff. But the biggest payments surface area in Europe is still in-store, and it’s scaling.

The acceptance footprint is expanding in parallel.

By the end of H1 2025, the euro area had about 24.7 million POS terminals, up 24% year on year. 93% of those terminals were contactless-enabled. At that point, “tap” stops being a payment method and becomes the default user interface for commerce.

The networks have been signalling the same direction. 

Mastercard has said that contactless accounted for more than 75% of transactions on its network in 2025. Visa has said that roughly 4 out of 5 in-store payments in Europe are contactless.

So what should PSPs, acquirers, and PayFacs do with this?

First, treat POS performance as a growth product, not a maintenance line item.

When 81% of card volume is in-store, small improvements in auth rates, terminal configuration, and exception handling move real money.

Second, invest in terminal estate quality and consistency.

With 93% contactless-enabled, the differentiator shifts from “can you accept?” to “can you accept cleanly?” Think kernel versions, floor limits, offline behaviour, reversals, and how fast you recover from edge cases at the lane.

Third, close the gap between in-store and online operations.

POS is where most transactions happen, and e-commerce is where most teams optimise. Unify reporting, dispute handling, refunds, and customer identity so merchants don’t run two payment businesses by accident.

Finally, get serious about data.

Contactless scale creates a steady stream of signals, and the winners will be those who turn them into fewer declines, fewer disputes, and better merchant decisions.

Europe is still growing in-store, it just does it with a tap.

For more Payments Strategy check out my newsletter https://lnkd.in/e6eXZrF9

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