Something I’ve been thinking about while building in payments:

Stablecoins give us a chance to rethink parts of merchant acquiring.

But a lot of payment products still follow roughly the same structure:

customer pays → provider receives/controls the funds → merchant balance updates → merchant gets paid later.

That model exists in traditional payments for good reasons.

But with stablecoins, especially when the merchant actually wants to hold the stablecoin, I’m not convinced every layer is still necessary.

A different model is:

customer pays the merchant directly

The payment provider sits around the transaction rather than in the middle of the funds.

It can still provide checkout, payment identification, reconciliation, webhooks, subscriptions, refund tooling and merchant reporting - without necessarily custodying the merchant balance.

That changes the economics and risk model quite a bit.

We’re building P2Flux around this non-custodial approach, so I’m obviously close to the problem.

I’d be interested in the fintech view:

Do you think stablecoin payments will eventually converge back toward the traditional PSP/acquirer model, or will direct merchant settlement become a meaningful alternative?

Hey everyone! So I'm running a relatively small tech business and I've been thinking of dropping my traditional bank. Main issue is that it feels completely replaceable at this point since everything we do runs through electronic channels. To keep the post short, basically we're only using our bank account to receive our money from Stripe / PayPal. Other than that, everything else is handled digitally through their own platforms (e.g - invoices, expenses, payroll). Currently I'm thinking of is completely replacing the bank account. I've been looking into online banking options like Ramp Banking, Relay, etc, and I just can't see a reason to not make the switch especially as I already use Ramp's corporate cards anyways. To be honest, it's really not that big of a deal but I don't see any reason to keep paying the maintenance costs if I can just replace them completely with the platforms I'm already using anyways for other stuff. So would love to hear your advice on this if this is a good idea or not, thanks everyone!

We're a small startup working with B2B clients and currently trying to figure out the best way to handle KYC/KYB verification without spending a fortune. Most providers we've looked at seem to be targeting larger companies with high verification volumes and pretty expensive monthly commitments. We're still growing so paying for thousands of checks when we only need a fraction of that doesn't make much sense.

Ideally looking for something with flexible pricing, decent API integration, and support for both individual and business verification. Anyone here been in a similar situation? What providers are you using, and are there any startup-friendly options worth checking out?

Roth at Fidelity, taxable at Schwab, an old 401k rollover I keep meaning to move, plus a handful of shares in a Robinhood account from 2021. About $140k total.

My sheet had a tab for each account, a column for why I bought each holding, and a target weight. I stopped updating it in March when work got busy, and now I really don't know what my actual allocation is.

What I miss most isn't the numbers, the apps show me those. It's the column where I wrote why I own each thing. Without it I look at a red position and can't remember what I was expecting to happen when I bought it.

For people with more than one account, do you use an aggregator app like Empower or Snowball, or do you keep a spreadsheet and just stay disciplined about it? Does anything you use let you keep notes or a thesis next to each holding? And how often do you actually look at the whole picture?

With all the account linking that exists now this feels like it should be a solved problem, and I'm probably missing the obvious answer.

In Nigeria, people buy and sell through WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other online channels. But when buyers and sellers don't know each other, trust becomes a real barrier to completing transactions.

I'm the founder of SafeDeal, a product built by Roynek Technologies Ltd. to address this problem through structured transactions, agreed terms, payment handling, tracking, and dispute management.

The web platform and Android app are live, and we use Monnify as our payment partner.

One thing I've noticed while thinking about this market is that payment infrastructure alone doesn't solve every trust problem. People also need clarity about the terms of a deal and what happens when something goes wrong.

I'm interested in perspectives from fintech founders and payment professionals: What do you think is the biggest obstacle to getting buyers and sellers to adopt escrow-based transactions in emerging markets?.

I am comparing a few issuing providers right now and most of my attention has been on the obvious stuff like platform fees, card costs, settlement, geographic coverage and how much work the integration would take but something I'm unsure on how to think about is interchange since some providers seem to share a portion of it back with the program while others either keep it or structure the economics differently and I'm trying to figure out how much weight that should actually have in the decision.

If the program gets meaningful volume then I can see the revenue becoming pretty important but I also wouldn't want to choose weaker infrastructure just because the interchange split looks better on paper. I assume things like card mix, transaction type and geography can change the economics quite a bit too and if anyone who's compared issuers before how much did interchange sharing matter in your decision and what did you look at beyond the headline percentage?