Sebastien Rousseau

CATEGORY

Payments & money

Rails, settlement, tokenisation, treasury programmability, and the economics of moving money.

21 tags

Tags in this category

  • ISO 20022 — 68 articles

    Wholesale and retail payments migration to ISO 20022 — pacs.008, pain.001, camt messaging, CBPR+, and the data-rich rail.

  • Cross-border payments — 28 articles

    FX, correspondent banking, multi-rail routing, G20 roadmap targets, and the cost-plus-speed dimensions of moving money across borders.

  • Stablecoins — 26 articles

    Issuance, reserves, redemption, regulation, and the role of stablecoins as a settlement asset alongside bank deposits.

  • Tokenised deposits — 24 articles

    Bank-issued deposit tokens, atomic settlement, programmable balance-sheet, and the policy framing around tokenised commercial bank money.

  • Payments — 7 articles

    Broad coverage of payment systems, rails, and the economics of moving money — sits above the rail-specific canonicals as the catch-all editorial entry point.

  • SWIFT — 5 articles

    Messaging, GPI, payment pre-validation, and SWIFT's evolving role in the multi-rail world.

  • Wholesale payments — 5 articles

    Interbank, large-value, market infrastructure payments — the wholesale side of banking infrastructure economics.

  • Decentralised finance — 4 articles

    DeFi protocols, smart-contract risk, on-chain liquidity, and where banks integrate (or intentionally don't) with the DeFi stack.

  • CBPR+ — 3 articles

    Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus — the SWIFT ISO 20022 usage guidelines for correspondent banking.

  • pain.001 — 3 articles

    Customer payment initiation message — corporate payment factories, validation, and the migration off MT101.

  • Payments automation — 3 articles

    Payment file creation, validation, exception handling, and the engineering side of payment ops.

  • Digital assets — 3 articles

    Tokenised assets, custody, settlement infrastructure, and the institutional adoption of digital-asset rails alongside traditional finance.

  • CBDC — 2 articles

    Wholesale and retail central bank digital currencies — design choices, project status, and the policy debate.

  • Real-time payments — 2 articles

    RTP, FedNow, SEPA Instant, UK Faster Payments — instant rail mechanics, liquidity, fraud, and pricing.

  • A2A payments — 2 articles

    Account-to-account rails, open banking payment initiation, and the agentic-payments use cases that ride them.

  • RTGS — 2 articles

    Real-time gross settlement systems — RTGS Renewal (UK), TARGET2/T2, Fedwire, and the operational windows banks integrate against.

  • pacs.008 — 2 articles

    The customer credit transfer message at the heart of cross-border ISO 20022 — schema, validation, automation, and orchestration.

  • Programmable liquidity — 2 articles

    Real-time treasury, intraday liquidity orchestration, programmable balance-sheet, and the agentic-treasury stack.

  • Treasury — 2 articles

    Corporate and bank treasury operations — liquidity management, cash forecasting, FX hedging, and the operating model that sits behind real-time treasury. The agentic / autonomous- treasury angle lives under the more specific ``programmable-liquidity`` canonical.

  • Open banking — 1 article

    PSD2, PSD3, CMA9, FDX — open banking APIs, payment initiation, and the data-portability fabric.

  • Agentic payments — 1 article

    AI agents initiating payments — consent, liability, fraud controls, audit, and the new payment UX.

Recent articles in Payments & money

APPLIED AI

The Wholesale Payments Index in 2026: ISO 20022, Tokenised Deposits, Real-Time Rails, and Cross-Border Settlement

An index framework for measuring wholesale-payments readiness in 2026: ISO 20022 structured-address compliance ahead of SWIFT's November 2026 milestone, tokenised-deposit settlement, BIS Project Agorá cross-border atomicity, real-time rail orchestration, and liquidity efficiency. Four percentages — structured-data completeness, rail-routing optimality, settlement-finality lag, and Agorá-corridor coverage — turn payment-operations posture into supervisory-ready evidence.

APPLIED AI

The Cloud Native Banking Index in 2026: DORA, Platform Engineering, Sovereign Cloud, and Operational Resilience

An engineering blueprint for cloud-native banking in DORA audit phase. Five platform-engineering primitives — Kubernetes paved roads, Backstage portal, GitOps via ArgoCD, Open Policy Agent admission, OpenTelemetry end-to-end — produce Article 8 register evidence at the speed of the pipeline. Tested exit-execution annually for CTPP-dependent CIFs against BIA-derived RTO targets. Sovereign-cloud options (AWS European Sovereign Cloud, Microsoft EU Data Boundary, Bleu, Thales / S3NS) addressed as engineering decisions, not branding.

APPLIED AI

The Quantum-Safe Banking Index in 2026: Post-Quantum Cryptography, QKD, Crypto-Agility, and Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later Risk

An index framework for measuring quantum-safe banking readiness in 2026: cryptographic bill of materials, hybrid TLS deployment, NIST FIPS 203 / 204 / 205 migration progress, crypto-agility primitives, and harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure across long-lived confidential data. The Board-Level Quantum Scorecard defines four exact percentages — inventory completeness, HNDL exposure, NIST migration progress, crypto-agility readiness — that turn project statuses into supervisory-ready evidence.

APPLIED AI

The Agentic AI Index for Banks in 2026: Measuring Autonomy, Governance, Auditability, and Business Impact

An engineering blueprint for agentic AI in tier-1 banks: classify by permissions not intelligence, treat every production agent as an SR 11-7 / SS1/23 model from day one, and build the five-component control plane — OAuth-scoped service accounts, deterministic semantic routing, OPA policy gates, immutable WORM audit logs, and a tested kill switch — that turns autonomous workflows into auditable evidence.

APPLIED AI

Post-Quantum Payments Infrastructure: Why Banks May Replace Rather Than Retrofit Legacy Rails

Harvest-now-decrypt-later turns today's TLS-protected payment messages into tomorrow's decrypted exposure. ML-KEM and ML-DSA are an order of magnitude larger than the RSA and ECC keys legacy rails were sized for — retrofit triggers fragmentation, latency, and HSM exhaustion. The 2026 architectural decision is whether to patch or replace before the regulatory clock runs out.

APPLIED AI

Wholesale Digital Markets in the UK: Tokenised Gilts, Settlement, and the New Champion Role

The UK Wholesale Digital Markets Champion role makes tokenised gilts, DLT-based settlement, and digital wholesale finance a national competitiveness project. The 2026 strategic question for banks is design discipline — which tokenised assets sit on which platform, how settlement risk is evidenced, and how to defend the City's wholesale role against Singapore, Switzerland, and Frankfurt.

APPLIED AI

ISO 20022 After Migration: Turning Payment Data into Banking Products in 2026

ISO 20022 after migration is not a project closeout — it's the start of a data-product opportunity. Structured addresses, purpose codes, invoice details, and rich status events become reconciliation, fraud, liquidity, and compliance products. The 2026 question is design discipline: which payment data carries which client workflow, priced for which corporate.