Sovereign Nations. Different Laws. One Complicated Payments System. On Indigenous Peoples' Day, it's time to examine why tribal gaming, lending, cannabis, tobacco and other regulated businesses remain difficult for financial institutions to support—and why better regulatory intelligence could change that. Today is Indigenous Peoples' Day. A day to recognize the histories, cultures, resilience and sovereignty […]
The Next Major Shift in Payment Risk Won’t Be Transaction Intelligence. It Will Be Product Intelligence. Banks and Processors Still Monitor Transactions, Chargebacks and Merchants. The Next Risk Layer Is Understanding What Their Merchants Are Actually Selling. For decades, payment risk has largely been managed from the transaction backward. Banks and processors monitor chargebacks. Fraud […]
The FTC's Warning to PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard Exposes a New Reality. Payments Is Being Told to Monitor More—and Debank Less. They Need to Prove Not Only That They Manage Risk, but Why They Make the Decisions They Make. Intelligence Is How You Do Both. The payments industry is receiving two messages that, at […]
How Many Enforcement Actions Before Merchant Monitoring Becomes a Board-Level Issue? Paddle. Nuvei. Humboldt. The FTC Is Sending Payments a Message. Three payment companies. Three FTC enforcement actions. More than $21 million in announced monetary settlements or relief. And one increasingly uncomfortable question for every processor, PayFac, merchant-of-record provider, acquirer and sponsor bank: How much […]
VAMP Is Measuring the Smoke. What If We Could See the Fire Starting? Why Merchant Intelligence and Product Intelligence May Become the Leading Indicators of Payment Risk For decades, medicine has struggled with a familiar problem: treating the symptom without fully addressing the underlying cause. The pain appears, so we treat the pain. The inflammation […]
“We Didn't Know” Is No Longer a Compliance Strategy The FTC's Humboldt Action Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Every Payment Processor, ISO and Sponsor Bank For years, there has been an uncomfortable reality inside payments. Sometimes the less you look, the less you find. And if you don't find it, perhaps nobody has to […]
What If Every Product in Commerce Had a Digital Compliance Identity? How Digitized Product Intelligence Could Transform Payments, Banking, Compliance and Regulated Commerce For decades, regulated-product compliance has largely operated in a world of documents. PDFs. Images. Labels. Certificates of Analysis. Laboratory reports. Ingredient lists. Licenses. Packaging. Testing records. Manufacturer documents. Emails. Spreadsheets. Folders. Shared […]
Payments Has a Product Problem Nobody Wants to Own The Next Compliance Infrastructure Battle Won't Be About Knowing the Merchant. It Will Be About Knowing What the Merchant Sells. Next week, thousands of people from across the payments ecosystem will gather to discuss what's changing in our industry and what comes next. There will be […]
AI Isn't Replacing Underwriters. It's Giving Them Their Jobs Back. The Future of Merchant Underwriting Isn't Human vs. Artificial Intelligence. It's Human Judgment Powered by Better Intelligence. There is a question being asked across almost every industry right now: Will AI replace my job? Payments isn't immune. As artificial intelligence moves deeper into merchant onboarding, […]
“High Risk” Is Broken We Keep Classifying Businesses When We Should Be Measuring the Risk Inside Them "High risk should be the conclusion of a risk assessment—not the starting assumption based on an industry label." - Noah Fitzgerald, CPP, CRO Qredible, Inc. After 30+ Years in Payments, I Think We Need to Have an […]
