Insights
Working notes from inside payments and banking technology.
Paycon publishes occasionally rather than on a schedule. The aim is to add something to the conversation that is not already in every payments newsletter — usually drawn from a problem just worked or about to be worked. The themes below are recurring.
Card acquiring & orchestration
Why third-party payment platforms keep disappointing the merchants and acquirers that buy them, what orchestration actually solves (and what it does not), and how multi-acquiring economics shift once you model scheme fees, interchange, and FX honestly. Paycon has watched this market evolve from monolithic processor stacks through to the current generation of payment orchestration layers, and is sceptical of both the promises and the pricing.
Digital banking & BaaS
The gap between digital banking pitch decks and digital banking P&Ls is wider than the industry admits. Notes on positioning a digital banking proposition for a regional market, building BaaS rails as a partner-economics question rather than a technology question, and the sequencing decisions that decide whether the platform earns or burns capital.
EMV, 3DS & SCA
EMV transition challenges — particularly the awkward US version — sat at the centre of the practitioner’s published work earlier in the career. The themes still matter: 3D Secure adoption economics, scheme-mandated SCA evolution under PSD2 and what comes next under PSD3, and the perennial gap between issuer and acquirer readiness on both sides of the Atlantic.
ATM & unattended retail
DCC-based ATM networks, vending payments, kiosks and unattended retail are niches with unusual unit economics. Cash is meant to be dying; the data on the ground is more interesting than that. Notes on building these networks from scratch, what scheme rules actually permit, and where the value pools are quietly forming.
Data & loyalty in retail
Transaction data is treated as a by-product in most payment businesses and as the entire product in others. Notes on retail loyalty, the modern-currency-of-data argument, and where loyalty platforms have stopped deserving the name.
Procurement & RFPs
What good RFP design looks like in payments and banking technology — from both sides of the table. Why the typical scoring matrix is reverse-engineered to fit the favourite, how to write requirements vendors can actually answer, and what to do when the demo is the only thing being evaluated.
If a topic on this page is on your team’s agenda this quarter, we should talk.