Who writes this
Major Matters is written by Charlie Major. Fifteen years in payments, building the infrastructure that quietly moves money for millions of people who will never know his name. He has shipped production systems as a hands-on engineer, set product direction as a leader, and sat in the rooms where the strategy gets decided, which means he can read a pull request and a P&L with equal fluency. He sees where payments, AI, and commerce are heading before the market names it, and he writes it down in plain language the day it matters. Most people who cover this never built it. He did, and still does: he also runs Major Labs, an independent research studio shipping open-source agent-safety tools and original data on how the agent economy actually works. That is why Major Matters reads from inside the machine, not the sidelines.
How we cover it
We are infrastructure-first, hype-skeptical, and evidence-led. We follow the systems being built, verify the claims being made, and name the gap between what gets announced and what actually works. The plumbing, not the press release.
- Follow the plumbing, not the press release. When a company announces something, we look at the architecture, the protocols, and the real numbers, not the headline figure.
- Name the gap. Almost every story has a space between what is claimed and what is real. We do not dismiss the technology. We ask what is still missing before it works at scale.
- Connect the layers. We rarely cover one company in isolation. We map how the pieces fit, so you can see how your corner of this connects to the broader shift.
- Respect your intelligence. No hype language, no breathless predictions. We state what happened, what it means, and what is unresolved, and let you draw your own conclusions.
- Ask the uncomfortable question. Every piece ends on the tension we could not resolve. Who bears the liability? Is the demand real? What happens when this breaks?
We are not a news wire, and we are not cheerleaders. We take the technology seriously and the evidence more seriously.
What we cover
Three beats: Payments Infrastructure, AI That Ships, and Commerce Decoded. Each piece is sourced from primary industry research, official company announcements, and first-hand experience as a practitioner who has spent a career inside payments and technology.
What we publish
- Weekly long-form analysis on majormatters.co
- Honest tool reviews in the AI Tools Directory
- Practitioner courses on payments, AI, and commerce
- Daily commentary on X and LinkedIn
Get in touch
A tip, a correction, a tool we should review, or just to say hello: hello@majormatters.co.
Editorial independence
Major Matters is operated independently. We do not take sponsorship money, we do not accept affiliate placements in editorial copy, and we say so when a tool we cover has a commercial relationship with us.
Charlie Major is a Product Development Manager at Mastercard. The views and opinions expressed in Major Matters are his own and do not represent those of Mastercard.