At first I saw it as just another integration but the more I think about it the more it feels like it sits at the center of how businesses move money.

For those who've built fintech products, when does it make sense to treat payroll as part of the core platform instead of something you connect to? Does that decision affect where you can go with things like cards or wallets later on?

One thing that stood out to me from Money20/20 Europe was how much discussion there was around avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

A few years ago, it felt like most merchants were happy to build around a single PSP. Now the conversation seems to be shifting toward flexibility, redundancy, and keeping options open.

Check it out at farzi.exchange, I've tried to walk through the technical side at Building a Financial Exchange from first principles

Let me know what you folks think on my approach!

So I've spent most of my career building market and operational risk models. On the insurance side we model risk using fat tailed distributions, we model tail co-dependence across assets and disregard anything gaussian or linear. Eventually what matters is how bad a year can really get and what can break our financial position.

I have seen the commercial software financial advisors use such as emoney, Right Capital, riskanalyze etc. and thinking whether any of these tools take risk seriously the way institutions do (fat tails, copulas, interdependencies, probabilities of loss, probability of ruin, VaR etc). If not what software do advisors use to quantify risk?

The reported Stripe + Advent bid for PayPal has been one of the more interesting fintech stories lately. If something like this actually happens, it could have a pretty big impact on the payments space.

Makes me wonder if more merchants will start looking at payment orchestration tools like PaymentKit so they're less dependent on any single provider if the market continues to consolidate.