Research
Independent analysis of payments, financial infrastructure, fintech, consumer behavior, market structure, and emerging financial technologies.
A History of Payments — Part I: From Barter to Institutional Trust
How payment technology evolved from barter and commodity metals to coins, banknotes, and institutional trust — and what that history suggests about the adoption of new forms of money.
Index
Zelle, Instant Payments, and Who Bears the Loss
Scale, scam reimbursement and structural responsibility in a bank-owned instant-payment rail.
How Payments Work Across the Tire Industry Supply Chain
How money, trade credit and transaction data move between raw-material suppliers, tire manufacturers, distributors, dealers, fleets and consumers.
Mobile Payments and Consumer Spending in the Post-Pandemic U.S.
An empirical analysis of how observed mobile-payment use relates to discretionary spending in the United States from 2021–2023, using Federal Reserve consumer-payment data.
American Payments System: Examining Consumer Payment Behavior
A senior thesis on how U.S. consumers' own ratings of cash, credit, and debit relate to the method they use in person — and to when they deviate from the method they say they prefer. Pooled 2021–2024 SCPC/DCPC data; associations, not causal effects.
Why America's Payment Rails Look Different From the Rest of the World
A comparative examination of payment infrastructure, instant payments, bank connectivity, and the institutional decisions that shaped today's systems.
The Economics of Payment Convenience
How small differences in friction, latency, and habit shape which payment instrument a consumer reaches for at the moment of purchase.
Instant Bank Payments and the Uneven Geography of Adoption
Why account-to-account payment schemes reached ubiquity in some markets within years and remain marginal in others.
Which Parts of Financial Infrastructure Eventually Become Invisible
An examination of how settlement, clearing, and authorization recede from view as systems mature — and what that concealment costs.
When Software Begins Initiating Transactions
Agentic software changes who — or what — is the counterparty. A first framework for analyzing machine-initiated payment flows.
Payment Instruments as Instruments of Trust
Reading the history of physical money as a record of the trust arrangements that made exchange possible.
Embedded Finance and the Redistribution of Margin
Where economics accrue when financial services are distributed through non-financial platforms.