Mexico Decides Who Pays to Leave Cash Behind

A framework law approved in Mexico's lower house in early October delegates the cost of digital acceptance to whoever moves last in the chain—card issuers, acquirers, or the state itself—without requiring any party to absorb it. A six-month trial that zeroed interchange at gas stations shows why: the subsidy leaked away, the regulatory ceiling on interchange removes the tool the trial used, and the law gestures toward SPEI-based QR codes as the permanent answer, leaving the market structure choice to regulators who have not yet chosen.

11 min read

The Regulator Writes the Screen

On September 3rd the Central Bank did not issue a payments rule. It issued an interface specification — and behind it sits exclusion from the arrangement for sixty months.

The Charter Is Not the Asset: What TabaPay Is Actually Buying in Denver

A $155 million raise, a $6.5 million bank, and the two conditions that will tell you whether the trade worked

The Stablecoin Field Guide: A Structural Map for Payments Professionals

Stablecoins have moved from crypto curiosity to a cross-layer force reshaping the payments stack. This field guide decodes the economics, regulators, and competitive moves by starting from the one fact that matters: a fiat-backed stablecoin issuer is a narrow bank that captures 100% of reserve float and cannot share it with holders—making distribution, not issuance, the actual prize.

24 min read

Agentic Commerce and the New Role of Card Issuers

Why Processing Infrastructure Becomes the Control Plane for Delegated Payments

Measuring Payments Cohort Cohesion: A Market-Adjusted Methodology

The quantitative methodology behind the cohesion read the Pulse reports each week: market-adjusted residual correlation, a leave-one-out reclassification test, and a full accounting of where the method fails.

12 min read

A Map, Not a Portfolio

The methodology behind the 50 TPC Payments Index — the reasoning that turns fifty tickers into an instrument for reading the payments ecosystem, and the discipline that keeps it from becoming a watchlist.

Debit After Durbin: Rewards, Routing, and the Search for Lost Economics

Fifteen years after Durbin capped debit interchange, the value it displaced migrated across the household wallet. As network ownership emerges as an issuer strategy, the unsettled question returns: who captures the value?

A Reward, or Interest? The Loyalty Question Deciding Stablecoin Law

Part I of a two-part research program. The Senate's market-structure bill is stalled, in part, over a definition the payments industry settled decades ago.

Control cannot be delegated: why smaller banks still own the card-issuing risk

The build-versus-buy decision in card issuing has narrowed to a layer-by-layer choice, not a binary. The Synapse collapse exposed that outsourcing operational control does not outsource regulatory accountability—and smaller institutions lack the leverage to negotiate terms that protect them when a partner fails.

12 min read