Why I started Payments in Full

Payments in Full will provide informed, strategic analysis of payments industry developments

I am a career strategy consultant, other than a 5-year stint (2014-2019) as the Head of Integrated Payments Strategy at JP Morgan.  All the companies I worked for restricted my publishing – for very good reasons.  They didn’t want individual voices speaking for the firm without extensive vetting. To publish, I needed to run a gauntlet of approvals that stripped out most of the interesting insights and made timely commentary impossible. In one case, my employer vetted a piece for 18 months – and then turned it down.

Again, they were right to do so! Major consulting firms and major banks don’t want to irritate their clients with opinions that might challenge their strategies. Such pieces have more downside risk than upside reward. In contrast, clients, colleagues, and analysts actively sought my views in private.

In the rare cases where I managed to run the publishing gauntlet, the pieces were usually well received. One reason I got my JP Morgan role is a piece I did speculating on their new ChaseNet initiative. Someone at Chase liked the piece so much they asked to use it to explain ChaseNet to their clients; I had similar feedback from a series I wrote on Reg II (Durbin) when that was brand new. Both these were outside-in efforts that readers found insightful. I recently co-authored two articles on embedded finance that were also very popular.

I have also been a long-term fan of Stratechery – a blog that covers high tech. I always thought the payments world could use a blog that is as obsessed with payments as Stratechery is with technology.

Payments has plenty of news sources, but limited strategic analysis. So, when I left McKinsey, I decided to try my hand at a payments-centric blog that delivers deeper analysis than what straight news provides. I will break no news, but I will interpret what news there is.

For full disclosure, I have no financial interest in payments companies. For the last 10 years I worked at companies with such strict conflict rules that I don’t own any individual stocks – payments or non-payments. All my investments are managed by a third-party with minimal input from me.

I just started as a part-time Corporate Strategy executive at Fifth Third Bank. I will spend the rest of my time writing Payments in Full. I plan to avoid topics where my two hats create a conflict. To be clear, the views expressed here are entirely my own and do not reflect the views of my friends at 5/3.

I have organized the material into four broad topic areas:

1. Comments on the news. The bulk of posts will be real-time analysis of payments industry developments. I can’t control when they happen, so I will need to fill slow weeks with other material

2. My Framework for thinking about payments. This is a series on why payments are important in financial services and how the industry is structured.

3. Incumbents vs. Insurgents will cover the competition among payments industry participants. This will often be Banks vs. Fintechs, but sometimes banks are the insurgents and fintechs the incumbents (e.g., Zelle vs. Venmo); and, sometimes it is Fintech on Fintech (e.g., Apple Pay vs. PayPal). I prefer the term “insurgent” to “disrupter” as not all new entities disrupt. The common thread among insurgents is tech-based business models. And, I prefer “incumbent” to “legacy” as the incumbents aren’t just standing still, and often have good reasons to stay the course

4. Industry analysis will address macro themes. I am particularly proud of the DDA primacy analysis. This will be the section that discusses regulatory actions, major mergers, major product launches, etc.

I hope my readers comment liberally, especially to tell me when I am wrong. Given that I will often be speculating, I expect to be wrong a lot; but, I will always be wrong from an informed perspective. Assuming I ever get any comments, I may do a second weekly post to respond. I promise to be civil.

I have structured each piece with an overlong, deep dive followed by a “Key Insights” section that summarizes the takeaways, The Key Insights will always be one page or less of bullets. Note that I do the summarizing manually despite everyone telling me I should have an AI do it. I am a bit of a luddite on that topic.

I hope you find all this as interesting as I do, and, if so, recommend it to your payments colleagues.

Andy Dresner