Who I am

I write from London. I started as an engineer shipping production payment systems, the kind that quietly move money for millions of people who will never know my name, and I went on to set product direction and sit in the rooms where the strategy gets decided. That path left me with a habit that is really the whole method of this site: I can read a pull request and a profit and loss statement with the same fluency, and I do not trust a claim about either until I have seen the thing itself.

I think by writing things down. That is most of why Major Matters exists. The pieces here are the notes I would want from someone inside the industry if I were outside it, published the day they matter, in plain language, with the sources attached.

Why payments

Payments is invisible infrastructure. Nobody thinks about it until it fails, and almost everything else in commerce sits on top of it. Having built it, I know how much of what gets announced never ships, how often the headline number is not the real number, and how the interesting part of any launch is usually the architecture nobody put in the press release. So that is what I cover: the plumbing, not the press release. What is shipping, who is shipping it, and what it means for how money moves.

How I feel about AI

I use these systems every day. I build with them at Major Labs, I have watched them do things that would have been science fiction when I started my career, and I am not a doomer. I am also not a cheerleader. I take the technology seriously and the evidence more seriously, and the evidence right now is that the frontier models stopped being products some time ago. They are infrastructure, load-bearing for other companies' systems and other people's money, and they are being deployed faster than anyone outside the labs can check.

The change I care most about is agents. For the first time, software is a counterparty. An agent can hold a credential, choose a merchant, and pay. That raises the questions every other counterparty in the economy already has to answer: who are you, what are you allowed to do, what did you do, and who pays when you get it wrong. Most of that stack is still empty. I spend a lot of my time describing the gap, measuring it, and proposing what would close it.

On the labs themselves, my view is the one in my open letter: every other industry whose failures reach beyond its own balance sheet, from banking to aviation, publishes its thresholds, is tested by people it does not pay, and reports its incidents to someone with the power to compel evidence. Frontier AI still grades its own homework. I do not know whether the labs can keep the promises they are making. I do know that nobody outside can verify them yet, and I would rather keep the log than take the promise on trust.

Why I started measuring

Opinions were not enough. In 2026 I started Major Labs, an independent research studio, because I wanted numbers nobody had to take my word for. Every Saturday it scans every server that AI agents use to reach tools, data, and money, scores what it finds, and publishes the results with the method and the data attached, under an open license. It keeps a source-traced timeline of agent incidents, a tracker of every attempt to give an agent an identity, and a weekly hash of the safety frameworks the frontier labs publish, so that when one changes quietly, there is a record. Nothing it measures pays to be measured.

What I believe

  • Infrastructure beats announcements. The architecture, the protocol, and the real number tell you more than the launch post ever will.
  • Name the gap, do not dismiss the technology. Almost every story has a space between what is claimed and what works. My job is to say exactly where it is.
  • Agents need what every counterparty has. A name, a mandate, a record, and someone who pays when it goes wrong. Until then, they are a liability nobody has agreed to hold.
  • A number without a method is a rumor. Everything I publish as data comes with how it was measured and what it cannot see.
  • You are smart. I state what happened, what it means, and what is unresolved, and I leave the conclusion to you. Every piece ends on the question I could not settle.

What you will find here

  • Analysis a few times a week, sent by email before it goes anywhere else
  • Living trackers of agent payment protocols, programmable money, and x402 adoption, updated as things change and traced to sources
  • Free courses on payments, AI in finance, and agentic commerce
  • Short answers to the questions I get asked most
  • The data, the incident timeline, and the open-source tools at majorlabs.co
  • Daily commentary on X and LinkedIn

The rules I write by, the frameworks I use, and how to cite this site are on the methodology page.

Independence

Nobody I write about pays me. I do not take sponsorship, I do not run affiliate placements in editorial copy, and if something I cover ever has a commercial relationship with me, I will say so in the piece. Corrections are dated and published.

Get in touch

A tip, a correction, a question you cannot get a straight answer to, or a disagreement, which I read most carefully of all: hello@majormatters.co.

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.