The last post on this blog was from June 2020. Six years is a long time in payments — long enough for PSD2’s SCA rollout to go from “announced” to “enforced” to “still arguing about edge cases,” for instant payments to become mandatory in Europe, and for AI agents to start making purchases on behalf of humans. A lot happened. I just wasn’t writing about it here.
That changes now.
I’ve rebuilt the site — new design, same domain. The posts that still hold up — the SEPA piece, the thoughts on empathy in engineering, the digital signup argument — are still here, and they’ve aged better than I expected.
Going forward, this is an opinionated blog about payment infrastructure, regulation, and the technology decisions that connect them. Written from Europe, from inside the industry, for the people who build and operate the plumbing. Not summaries of press releases. Not neutral overviews. If I think something is well-engineered, I’ll say so. If I think a regulation misses the point, I’ll say that too.
The first new piece is The Payment Lasagna — a look at how agentic commerce protocols are stacking up against the six tightly coupled layers of payment infrastructure, and why “move fast” collides with an industry that took a decade to roll out chip cards.
If you were subscribed before and forgot this blog existed — fair enough. I did too, for a while. But the payments landscape has never been more interesting, and there’s too much happening to not write about it.
Welcome back. Or just welcome.