Perspectives.
Writing on payments economics, market structure, and policy.
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Automating the rebuttal does not win the chargeback
Automated representment is cheap to run and routinely loses. The card networks now pull the provable disputes onto their own deflection rails, leaving the rest to be won by a customised letter rather than data flow.
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Mastercard is buying the stablecoin rails that were meant to replace it
Stablecoins were supposed to route value around the card networks. Mastercard has answered by buying the rail; the interchange relief merchants keep winning is now recaptured at a services layer no regulator caps.
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Mobile driver's license is replacing the SSN as the US identity primitive
The SSN became the US identity primitive by accident, and the 2017 Equifax breach made it functionally useless as one. Four candidates have positioned to replace it; state-issued mobile driver's license has won the role by adoption.
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Sovereign instant rails are unwinding the domestic-acceptance subsidy
Scheme cross-border interchange has subsidised domestic acceptance pricing for two decades. The cross-subsidy is unwinding from two directions: sovereign instant rails competing on the demand side, and the Reserve Bank of Australia capping foreign-card interchange on the supply side. Mastercard's Q1 2026 cross-border deceleration is the early evidence.
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The US is the largest economy without integrated Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital Public Infrastructure (identity, real-time payments, and consent-based data exchange built as one interoperable stack) is the framework the G20, World Bank, UNDP, and BIS have adopted as the model. India operates the largest live deployment, Singapore and Australia the institutionally mature versions. The US has built each piece on a separate track with no interoperability mandate.
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Agentic commerce is breaking the chargeback math
Friendly fraud functions as a cross-subsidy across honest cardholders and cooperative merchants. The system held under stationary loss distributions; agentic commerce breaks the priors. VAMP April 2026 is the first re-pricing already in motion.
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Card schemes are pricing the identity layer themselves
Authentication had a near-zero shadow price for thirty years because it sat inside interchange. The price is now surfacing through scheme fees, and the rent is flowing back to the schemes, not to the third-party identity SaaS layer the prevailing fintech narrative says will capture it.
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Capital One has collapsed US debit to three networks
The Capital One acquisition of Discover ended the four-network US debit market. Capital One has migrated $175B of annual debit volume onto Discover. The math reads cleanest from the small-issuer seat, where exempt interchange revenue is concentrated.