Independent fintech analysis
Payment rails, banking infrastructure and market plumbing, explained from the fee schedules and the filings. Every figure dated. No recommendations.
Banking & Neobanks
A fintech app saying 'FDIC-insured' is making a narrower claim than most users hear. The insurance covers the bank failing — not the app failing, and not the ledger in between being wrong.
Payments & Rails
Both move money between bank accounts without a card. The difference is not really speed — it is when the transfer stops being reversible, and who is exposed while it still is.
Tools & Comparisons
Rails are usually compared on speed and cost. Compared instead on when a payment becomes irreversible and who absorbs a loss, the ranking changes completely.
RegTech & Compliance
Two-factor authentication and SCA are not the same thing. The European rule specifies which categories count, how they must be combined, and what must tie the approval to the specific payment.
Markets & Infrastructure
A CCP does not remove risk from a market. It concentrates it deliberately in one heavily capitalised place, then defends that place with margin, a default fund and a published waterfall.
Lending & Credit
The disclosure rules that govern US consumer credit are less about protecting borrowers from bad deals than about forcing every deal into a comparable shape. That distinction explains most of what they do.
Explainers
A payment that has 'gone through' has not necessarily finished. Finality is the moment a transfer becomes unconditional and irrevocable, and it arrives at a different point on every rail.
Payments & Rails
How value actually moves, what each rail costs, and who captures the spread.
1 article
Banking & Neobanks
Account products and the balance-sheet mechanics that decide whether they last.
1 article
Markets & Infrastructure
The infrastructure layer between an order and a settled position.
1 article
Lending & Credit
Who lends, on what data, at what price, and how the losses show up.
1 article
RegTech & Compliance
The rules that bind financial products, and the software built to satisfy them.
1 article
Tools & Comparisons
Like-for-like comparisons where every figure carries a source and a date.
1 article
Explainers
Mechanism-first explanations, written for someone who needs to understand, not act.
1 article