"all of their end party customers are immediately accessible to other intermediaries participating in the payments system"
Processing, switching, settlement
Push vs. Pull Payments
Credit Risk in payments
One reason why $ADYEN doesn't do full stack acquiring for Airlines
Why only banks (until recently) could join $V $MA networks
How to solve the Chicken and Egg Problem in payments? The Government
Why ACH is different
$PYPL invented the two small microdeposits to verify account ownership
"A debit transaction may be just as profitable for $V $MA as a credit transaction - certainly not true for a bank issuer. Although $V $MA set interchange fees, they do not receive those fees - in theory, $V $MA could be fine if interchanged disappeared entirely."
Clear definition of acquiring
Why debit card use is increasing faster than credit (not the faux BNPL "kids don't like credit" narrative).
A stable coin would be preferable for cross border payments because it wouldnt involve currency conversion costs + markups
"The top ten card issuers handled over 80% of total general-purpose card purchase volume at the end of 2015"
Why wire payments will always take forever
Payments behavior is very sticky
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Nobody wants to say it out loud because the Stripe mafia, but the primary reason for lower employee costs at Adyen vs Stripe is because the people running Stripe run it with VC dollars and owners run Adyen.
Does that explain all the differences? No of course not but it is absolutely one of the most important aspects of the company. Watching Stripe hire and fire during the bubble vs Adyen patiently waiting is absolutely core to employee cost differential.
Lastly bottoms up disruption mental model doesn't apply in payments. You're never going to sign up enough SMBs to get scale, you sign up ecom aggregators like Shopify, substack, Etsy, eBay etc... and what does that sale smotion look like? Exact same as enterprise? Would love to know why you think this is wrong @benthompson
TikTok ban is great example of LT vs. St thinking. ST traders would likely buy but in no way is it a LT positive for $META.
Banning TT will only modestly increase reels consumption over maybe a year or two. Why modestly? Because it only modestly (if any?) decreased consumption thus far.
What actually matters is TT ushered in SFV. SFV kneecaped Facebook. TT proved the bears right. Social graph value went to zero as the AI algo took over. LT TT ban doesn't change the fact that SFV is a no moat capital intensive biz which will see multiple new entrants.
Pretty wild how political Naval, someone who claims to be peaceful and open minded is. One of the smartest people I've ever learned from, whose brain utterly destroyed by politics. It truly is hard to be the person he pretends to be, even he can't do it!
Naval the Nutcase.
"Impossible to understand macro economics" - Naval
Yet here I have five sentences explaining the current inflation paradigm that's absolutely incorrect and based on my political leanings rather than logic or without the nuance of complexity.
"Interpreting ratings as a due diligence mechanism is intuitive but anachronistic... Ratings serve to mitigate information asymmetries between institutional investors, clients, and regulators through independent risk estimates" $SPGI $MCO h/t @rhunterh
"When ratings drastically change, market actors are forced to make hasty changes to their portfolios to adhere to the stipulations of the contracts and regulations that bind them."
"any competitor able to offer more reliably accurate indicators of credit risk should have the potential to supplant the Big Three. But reliably accurate indicators of credit risk are a mirage... it is not possible to accurately account for all possible contingencies"