Volume 41 · Winter
A three-part investigation into message standards, scheme governance, and the small committees that decide what a payment is allowed to say.
Read the thesis ↓A message format is a political document. It decides what a payment is permitted to say, and therefore what the system is capable of imagining.
Every scheme in the world is governed by a committee most participants have never met. Those committees decide field lengths, character sets and permitted purposes: the grammar that all money must be written in.
Our position is simple. Infrastructure is not neutral. Whoever controls the schema controls the roadmap.
“A field that does not exist in the message is a product that cannot exist in the market.— Editorial, Volume 37
How a message-format migration quietly redrew the map of who holds power.
The eleven committees that write payment rules, and who actually sits on them.
What a payment message cannot carry, and the products that die because of it.
A decade of protocol change across forty markets, measured against its promises.
Sources: ISO TC68, European Payments Council, national scheme registries. Winter 2026.
Four issues a year. Print and wire. No advertising, no sponsorship, and no coverage of any body we hold a seat on.