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.
Latest writing
Deposit tokens and stablecoins: friends, foes, or parallel universes?
15 April 2026 · Stablecoins & deposit tokens. Where the two converge, where they don’t, and where each is weaker than its advocates admit. Stablecoins are further along the maturity curve; deposit tokens have stronger theoretical foundations but barely exist at production scale. Until one solves the other’s core problem, or a shared settlement layer bridges both, they remain parallel rails. Read →
Fast payments at the European point of sale: a card-payments perspective on what’s missing
1 April 2026 · Card acquiring & orchestration. Wero, SEPA Instant, and NFC at the POS are a compelling vision. But card payments at the point of sale are an ecosystem with terminal certification, multi-party liability frameworks, mature dispute resolution, and consumer protection refined over decades. Replacing that requires more than a faster, cheaper clearing rail. Read →
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.
Stablecoins, deposit tokens & on-chain payments
Stablecoins crossed the line from crypto curiosity to payments rail somewhere between PayPal launching PYUSD, Stripe acquiring Bridge, and the major card networks announcing stablecoin settlement. Bank-issued deposit tokens, distinct from non-bank stablecoins in legal status and reserve treatment, are arriving in parallel. The interesting questions are no longer ideological — they are operational: which corridor first, which counterparty, how does treasury actually settle on Friday afternoon, and where does MiCA, the GENIUS Act, and the emerging deposit-token frameworks leave issuers, PSPs, and bank treasuries that want to integrate. Paycon writes about the boring middle — the integration, the unit economics, the regulated path — rather than the price of any particular token.
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.