Decoded payments, AI, and commerce.
Built for practitioners. Each course maps a piece of the financial-services stack the way it actually works in production, not the way the marketing decks say it should.
How the courses work
Each course is a set of short written lessons (six to ten per course) that teaches one piece of the stack end to end: how the money moves, who the parties are, where the risk sits, and what breaks in production. Written in the same evidence-led voice as the newsletter, for people who work in or around payments, fintech, and AI. Read a lesson in ten minutes; finish a course in an evening or two.
The badge on each card is the access level: Subscriber courses are free to read with a newsletter subscription (your email is the key, one click to unsubscribe), and Free lessons are open to everyone. There is no paid tier today. Already subscribed? Open any lesson and enter the same email, and it unlocks on that device. There is no password or login.
Not sure where to start? Take a learning track: a curated path of five or six courses sequenced for your role, from Payments Expert to Agentic Commerce Builder. Or begin with Payments Architecture 101 and branch out from there.
AI in Financial Services
How AI models are built, deployed, and operated inside banks, payment processors, and fintechs. From ML pipelines to production.
Card & Network Economics
Follow the basis points: how interchange, scheme fees, and the four-party model decide who pays, who earns, and who sets the rules in every card transaction.
Checkout Architecture & the Conversion Stack
How a checkout actually converts, authorizes, and recovers money, decomposed from the buy button to the settlement file.
Clearing & Settlement: How Money Actually Moves
The rails beneath the rails: how a payment goes from authorized to irrevocably settled, and where the risk lives in between.
Disputes & Chargebacks, End to End
The only multi-party money-reversal system in payments, mapped from the cardholder’s claim to the final allocation of liability.
Fraud and Risk Architecture
How financial services actually fight fraud. From identity verification to real-time scoring to the AI arms race.
MCP as a Product Strategy Multiplier
The product person's guide to Model Context Protocol. Frameworks for making MCP decisions without becoming a protocol expert.
Model Risk Management for LLMs
What happens to a 50-year-old bank validation discipline when the model is a black-box LLM nobody trained, and how to govern it without grinding deployment to a halt.
Money Movement Operations: Treasury, Liquidity & Licensing
Everything that has to be true before you can legally hold a dollar and reliably move it: licenses, accounts, float, and the messaging standard the whole industry is rebuilding around.
Open Banking and Real-Time Payments
The new rails competing with cards. Real-time settlement, open banking APIs, and the multi-rail future.
Payments Architecture 101
How money actually moves. Map the card payments system from first tap to final settlement.
Platform & Marketplace Payments
When you move money on behalf of others, you inherit a balance sheet, a compliance perimeter, and a settlement engine. This is how to build all three.
Programmable Money: Stablecoins, Tokenized Deposits & CBDCs
A practitioner’s map of money that carries logic and settles in seconds, separating what already ships in production from what is still a whitepaper.
Securing Money-Moving Agents
Agent identity, mandates, and the prompt-injection kill chain for systems where a manipulated agent can wire funds to the wrong account.
Shipping a Payments Product: PM & Eng Craft
What it actually takes to take a payments feature from idea to production: scoping, integration choices, money-movement edge cases, compliance gates, and the launch checklist that keeps you out of an incident review.
Subscriptions, Billing & Dispute Defense
Recurring revenue lives or dies in the parts no one demos: dunning, involuntary churn, and the chargeback you fight from the merchant seat.
The Agentic Commerce Stack
How AI agents discover, negotiate, and purchase. The infrastructure layer being built beneath autonomous commerce.
The Data Substrate for AI in Finance
Provenance, lineage, and explainability as infrastructure, because in regulated finance you must prove not just what the model decided, but what data it stood on and why.
The Payments Strategy Playbook
Decision frameworks for payments leaders. Architecture design, vendor evaluation, pricing optimisation, and international expansion.
The Regulatory Architecture of Payments
The rulebooks that decide what your product is allowed to do, mapped to the systems that have to enforce them.