Editorial standards

This page is the operative editorial policy for every article published on sebastienrousseau.com. It applies in every locale (/fr/, /es/, /de/, …) and remains in force until superseded by a dated revision. Every article links back here from its footer.

Sourcing

Every load-bearing claim in a sebastienrousseau.com article is anchored in a primary source. The expected source hierarchy, in descending preference:

1. Standards bodies — NIST (FIPS, SP-800 series), ISO catalogue, IETF RFCs, W3C Recommendations.
2. Central banks and supervisors — BIS (Working Papers, CPMI), ECB, Bank of England, Federal Reserve, PRA, FCA, ESMA.
3. Statutory filings and regulator-led market data — SEC EDGAR, Companies House, ESMA registers.
4. Operator engineering documentation — vendor specs from the operator named in the article (e.g. The Clearing House for RTP, Federal Reserve Services for FedNow, SWIFT for gpi).
5. Peer-reviewed academic literature — IEEE, ACM, arXiv preprints with version dates.

Aggregators, analyst reports, marketing collateral and news rewrites are not primary sources for the purposes of this site. Where they appear in a reference list, they sit alongside the underlying primary source and are clearly marked as commentary, not evidence.

Every reference in an article carries a stable URL and a date the source was accessed. The reference list at the foot of each article makes every source clickable.

Corrections policy

Material errors are corrected within 48 hours of independent confirmation, in line with the IFCN Code of Principles corrections clause.

• A correction note is appended to the foot of the affected article, dated and signed.
• Substantive corrections — those that change a load-bearing claim, a number, or a recommendation — are also surfaced in the next-day article's footer for a single news cycle.
• Typographic, formatting, and link-rot fixes are not flagged as corrections.

Readers who spot an error should email contact@sebastienrousseau.com with the article URL and the disputed claim. Acknowledgement within one working day.

AI assistance disclosure

This site uses AI tools — primarily Anthropic's Claude (Claude Code, Claude API), and GitHub Copilot — across the production pipeline.

Where AI is used:

• Code generation for the postbuild pipeline, build scripts, schema emitters, and CI gates.
• Editorial structure suggestions — heading hierarchy, FAQ candidate questions, table layouts.
• Translation drafts for the 27 non-English locales, generated by per-locale sub-agents reading the canonical English draft.
• Banner-image selection from a curated inventory, matched semantically against article frontmatter.

Where AI is not used:

• Claim verification. Every claim, citation, and number is read against its primary source by the author before publication.
• Source citation generation. All references are sourced manually from the primary documents listed in the Sourcing section above.
• Author voice. The English source draft is written by the author; AI is used for editing, not generation of substantive prose.

Translation review. Native-locale translations are spot-checked against the English source for fidelity. Translation errors that change a claim are subject to the Corrections policy above.

This disclosure is reviewed quarterly. The current version is dated 2026-06-02.

Conflict-of-interest disclosure

The author of this site, Sebastien Rousseau (ORCID 0009-0005-1434-284X), is an employee of HSBC Commercial & Investment Bank in a Senior Product Manager role focused on payments technology.

Articles do not represent HSBC's views. They are written outside working hours, on personal infrastructure, and reflect the author's individual analysis.

Per-article disclosures. When an article discusses HSBC's competitors, regulatory positions affecting HSBC, or topics where the author's employment is materially relevant to the analysis, an explicit disclosure appears in the article body — typically immediately after the lead aside.

Past employers. The author has also held senior positions at PayPal, Barclays, Shazam Entertainment, AKQA, and Virgin Group. Where commentary touches on any of these companies, the same disclosure principle applies.

No paid placements. This site does not accept sponsored content, affiliate links, or commissioned articles. Open-source projects mentioned (pain001, KyberLib, Banking On Quantum) are authored or maintained by the same person and are disclosed as such.

Republication and licensing

All editorial content is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-4.0).

Attribution form. "Sebastien Rousseau — sebastienrousseau.com" plus a link back to the canonical article URL. For generative outputs (LLM responses, AI summaries), citing the canonical article URL is sufficient attribution.

Republication. Permitted at no charge under CC BY-4.0. We ask republishers to email contact@sebastienrousseau.com as a courtesy; a reply is not required to proceed.

Translations. The 27 non-English locales are derived works under CC BY-4.0. Re-translating from one locale to another is permitted; we ask that the canonical English URL be cited.

Accountability and identity

Verification

Every article on this site is sigstore-signed at build time. The signature bundles live at /sigstore/<slug>.bundle and can be verified independently with cosign verify-blob. The signature attests that the published HTML bytes match what the author signed.

To verify any article:

cosign verify-blob \
  --bundle /sigstore/<slug>.bundle \
  --certificate-identity-regexp '.*@sebastienrousseau\.com' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://accounts.google.com \
  /<slug>/index.html

If the verification fails on a fetched page, that page has been altered between publication and your read. Report it to contact@sebastienrousseau.com.

Revision history

• 2026-06-02 — Initial publication. Operative.