I'm Thierry Coopman. I've spent more than two decades inside the machinery of payments — acquiring, processing, card schemes, SEPA, SWIFT, compliance — the kind of infrastructure most people only notice when it breaks.
That career took me through processors, a neobank, a domestic card scheme, and ventures where the job was to make money move reliably across borders, currencies, and regulations. Along the way I've dealt with PCI audits, PSD2 implementations, ISO 20022 migrations, regulatory reporting, tax compliance — and the kind of legacy system archaeology that keeps financial services both running and frustratingly slow.
Beyond the technical side, I've always been drawn to the operational reality — keeping platforms running flawlessly, onboarding merchants and partners, building the business operations that turn a product into something that delivers value to customers and revenue to companies. The work that sits between the architecture diagram and the P&L.
Here's what I've learned: the technology is globally the same. ISO standards, message formats, API patterns — same principles everywhere, different packaging. But the moment you look at how people actually use payments, everything changes. Culture shapes financial behaviour more than technology ever will. Neighbouring countries with identical infrastructure can have radically different payment habits. That gap between the universal tech layer and the local human layer is where the interesting problems live.
※ This site is where I write about payments, finance, regulation, technology — and whatever else catches my attention. Sometimes that's a long essay tracing a cultural pattern across borders. Sometimes it's a short link to someone who said it better than I could.
If you're building something in this space, fixing something, or just trying to make sense of the alphabet soup — I'd enjoy the conversation.