Point of View
Point of View
Where payments is going — and what it means for the organizations building it. Perspectives from 18+ years at the intersection of financial services, technology, and customer experience.
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PAYMENTS & FINANCIAL SERVICES
The Real-Time Payments Inflection Point
The Real-Time Payments Inflection Point: What Financial Institutions Need to Get Right in the Next 18 Months
INTRODUCTION
The CFPB's open banking rule under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, combined with the rapid adoption of FedNow and the maturing RTP network, represents the most significant infrastructure shift in U.S. financial services since ACH modernization. Most institutions are treating it as a compliance exercise.
That's a strategic mistake.
THE OPPORTUNITY THAT MOST ARE MISSING
Open banking mandates are typically framed as a data-sharing obligation — a requirement to let customers move their data to competitors. That framing leads to defensive product strategies: build the minimum required API surface, add friction to the consent flow, and protect the existing account relationship.
The institutions that will win in this environment are the ones that recognize open banking as a distribution advantage, not a data risk. When your platform becomes the trusted data hub that connects a customer's financial life — their bank account, their AP workflow, their payroll, their benefits — you become infrastructure. And infrastructure is very hard to displace.
WHAT MULTI-RAIL TEACHES US
Having built multi-rail B2B payment architecture at American Express — integrating card, ACH, and RTP into a single workflow layer embedded in enterprise AP platforms — I've seen firsthand what happens when you become the connective tissue of a payment workflow rather than a single payment option. Volume follows naturally. Loyalty follows. Switching costs compound. The same dynamic is about to play out in consumer banking, SMB lending, and corporate treasury at scale. The winners will be the institutions that own the workflow — not just the payment method.
THREE THINGS PRODUCT TEAMS SHOULD BE BUILDING NOW
1. Developer-grade open banking APIs with genuine documentation, sandbox environments, and integration support — not compliance-minimum endpoints.
2. Consent management experiences that build trust rather than bury it in 14-page disclosures. The institutions that make data portability feel safe will capture the customers who use it.
3. Real-time data pipelines that turn the 1033 data feed into a personalization engine — so that when a customer shares their financial data, the experience immediately gets better.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Open banking isn't happening to financial institutions. It's an invitation to rebuild the infrastructure of trust — on better foundations than the ones we've been using for 30 years. The product leaders who understand this will be the ones their organizations turn to when the transformation gets hard.
The Invisible Bank: How Payments Intelligence Can Reclaim the Customer Relationship
Published June 2026 · 7 min read
Apple Pay. Google Pay. Zelle. Venmo. The rails are yours — the relationship is slipping.
As digital wallets and overlay services become the primary interface between consumers and their money, banks, card issuers, and networks face a defining challenge: staying relevant to a customer who may never open their banking app. The good news? The data advantage is irreplaceable. No wallet provider, no fintech overlay, no payment aggregator has what you have — a 360-degree view of the customer relationship across transactions,
products, and time.
Drawing on 15+ years building transaction data infrastructure and hyper-personalization platforms at American Express, this piece maps the ecosystem, the opportunity, and the watchouts for payments leaders ready to turn data into their most durable competitive asset.
The KYC Blind Spot
The KYC Blind Spot at the Heart of Global Payments
Published May 2025 · 4 min read
Most fintechs don't run deep Know Your Customer programs of their own — they quietly inherit the compliance posture of the established banks whose rails they ride. For years, that arrangement held. Generative AI just broke it.
Synthetic identity fraud is now cheaper and more convincing than ever, making lightweight-KYC fintechs the most attractive entry point for bad actors looking to inject illicit funds into legitimate payment networks. And the risk doesn't stay at the edge — it flows to the originating bank, across the network, and to the receiving institution.
Then there's the harder question: as JPMorgan and Citi race to build tokenized, blockchain-based payment rails designed for programmable, borderless speed, who owns the identity layer? A tokenized payment that clears in seconds is only as clean as the wallet that initiated it. Blockchain's immutability doesn't protect you — it just makes the audit trail permanent.
The industry needs to stop treating KYC as an outsourced cost center and start building identity verification into the protocol layer of modern payment rails. Speed and compliance are not opposites — but right now, the payments ecosystem is acting like they are.
Apple, Visa & Platform Accountability
When Two Giants Share a Security Gap, Nobody Fixes It
What Apple and Visa Can Teach Us About Product Accountability
Published May 2025 · 4 min read
Four years ago, researchers discovered that Apple Pay's Express Transit mode combined with Visa's contactless protocol had a serious flaw: a cheap NFC device could silently charge an unlimited amount to a locked iPhone — no Face ID, no confirmation required. Apple was told. Visa was told. Nothing was fixed.
The security mechanics are interesting. The organizational dynamics are more instructive.
Apple's defense: it's a Visa protocol issue — their hardware works as designed. Visa's defense: fraud incidence is low and zero-liability protects the customer. Both positions are technically accurate. Neither is strategically satisfying — because customer trust is not the same as fraud incidence rate. A $10,000 charge on a locked phone, even if refunded, violates the felt experience of control.
Visa's data-based reasoning is exactly the kind of thinking that works in quarterly reviews but quietly erodes brand equity over time.
What this situation really exposes is a failure mode common to platform ecosystems: when two parties each own a piece of the problem and neither owns the whole, accountability falls through the gap. The companies that figure out how to hold both — rigorous risk management and proactive investment in customer trust — are the ones that will own the next decade of consumer financial products.
AI & Fraud Strategy
AI in Payments Is No Longer a Differentiator — It's Table Stakes
Real-World Insights on How AI Is Transforming Fraud Strategies Worldwide
Published April 2025 · 3 min read
The latest ACI Worldwide global study on fraud and financial crime makes one thing unmistakably clear: we have entered the era of "Instant Everything" — and our trust models haven't kept up. Real-time payments have eliminated the luxury of post-event review. For payments leaders, the "wait and see" approach to AI is now officially a liability.
Four strategic imperatives stand out for 2026:
Convergence is the new competitive advantage. Treating fraud, identity, and payments as separate P&Ls is the greatest gift we give to fraudsters.
Solve the talent gap with low-dependency tech. Only 1 in 5 firms have the AI talent they need. Leadership must pivot toward self-learning, low-code AI platforms that let existing teams deploy models without a data science backlog.
Move from "Who" to "Why." In an instant-settlement world, verifying identity isn't enough. We need pre-transaction behavioral intelligence that validates intent before money moves.
Data privacy is the strategy, not a constraint. The winners won't hoard data — they'll lead privacy-first, anonymized intelligence sharing across payment networks.
We've spent the last decade securing our systems. The next decade is about scaling trust — making it the most frictionless part of the transaction.
[Read the full article →]
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AI & INNOVATION
AI & Customer Experience
Is AI Good Enough to Define Customer Experience?
Published April 2025 · 3 min read
We've all seen the demos. AI is faster, smarter, and far less painful than the "press 1 for help" bots of a decade ago. It's tempting to think we can plug it in and let it solve CX. But there's a critical distinction too many product leaders are missing right now:
AI is a world-class engine. It's a terrible architect.
It can execute a customer journey at lightning speed. It cannot tell you why that journey matters to a human being.
Steve Jobs said it plainly: "Start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology." Too many organizations today are doing the exact opposite — starting with the AI tool and working forward to a problem they hope exists.
The real test of any CX isn't functional — does the app work? AI handles that well. The test is emotional: does the customer feel understood at the moments that matter most? Those are the "unseen" parts of a journey — the difference between an air travel experience that ends at the gate versus one that ends when you finally get into a cab at 1 AM. Those nuances are where brands are built or broken, and no model is trained to feel them.
The companies that dominate the next decade won't be the ones with the most AI. They'll be the ones who use AI to amplify the soul of their brand — not replace it.
[Read the full article →]
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The Future of Work & Human Connection
The Future Doesn't Just Happen — We Make It Happen
Published Feb 2025 · 2 min read
A video about automation, almost a decade old, recently crossed my feed again. When it was first released, the ideas felt bold. Maybe distant. Today, with AI accelerating at the pace we're seeing, it doesn't feel distant at all. It is present.
One line stayed with me: "The future doesn't just happen… the future gets happened."
Change of this magnitude is unsettling — and I think it's important to say that plainly rather than paper over it with optimism. As humans, it's natural to fear disruption, especially when it challenges how we work, create value, and define ourselves.
But I also see this moment as an invitation. An invitation to refocus on people — on empathy, curiosity, and authentic connection. To ask better questions about the kind of future we want to shape, rather than passively inheriting the one that arrives.
For me, this is a season of un-learning and re-learning. Letting go of assumptions that were true five years ago and may not be true today. Adapting faster. Becoming better at adopting technology while continuing to form honest, personal connections.
Because the real advantage in an AI-driven world may not be technical fluency alone.It may be humanity. The future doesn't just happen. We make it happen — through the choices we make every day.
[Read the full article →]
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CONTINUOUS LEARNING
What I'm Learning
I believe that product leaders who stop being students stop being effective.
Here is what is currently on my desk:
READING
→ "The Payments Industry Handbook" — staying current on ISO 20022 migration and cross-border payment infrastructure
→ CFPB Section 1033 final rule and industry response analysis
→ FedNow adoption reports — tracking merchant and bank enrollment velocity
FRAMEWORKS IN PRACTICE
→ Exploring how AI-assisted invoice processing changes the ROI calculus for multi-rail AP automation (spoiler: it's significant)
→ Testing hypothesis: does frictionless real-time payment settlement change B2B buyer behavior in the same way micro-redemption changed consumer reward behavior?
COMMUNITY
→ MIT CPO peer network — ongoing case study discussions on platform strategy
→ Member aiglo.org — ongoing review of AI enhancements and use case adoption
→ Following the work coming out of the BIS on CBDC infrastructure and its implications for commercial payment rails
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