🧾 The Settlement Layer Archive
47 briefings
Two of Africa's largest financial regulators are taking distinctly different approaches to market structure this week. I…
The machine-to-machine economy is rapidly moving from theoretical frameworks to live infrastructure. As the 'Know Your A…
The economic mechanics of the newly formed Open USD consortium are beginning to crystalize. By choosing to distribute re…
A rare consortium of traditional payment rivals—including Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe—has joined forces to launch Open …
The European Union's MiCA regulatory framework takes full effect today, instantly reshaping the regional crypto market a…
The move toward sovereign and specialized payment infrastructure continues today on The Settlement Layer. In Africa, pay…
State actors are stepping directly into the settlement layer today to formalize the infrastructure underpinning digital …
The geopolitical fault lines of the tech and financial stack are shifting in real time. Today's edition covers a major n…
Today on The Settlement Layer, the payment stack is undergoing a dual expansion: outwards into new regions and upwards t…
South Africa's central bank is expanding its regulatory perimeter, drafting new rules to capture previously unmonitored …
Today's briefing tracks the structural plumbing being laid for tomorrow's commerce. Nigeria's central bank is forcing a …
Today on The Settlement Layer, the focus is on infrastructure hitting its limits. From mobile money outgrowing its techn…
Today on The Settlement Layer, the focus is on control. Regulators from Nigeria to South Africa are implementing new rul…
Today on The Settlement Layer, the push for digital sovereignty is reshaping African fintech. Regulators are drawing har…
Today's briefing tracks the two speeds of agentic commerce. The first is infrastructure being built and shipped now, as …
Today on The Settlement Layer, a common thread is the push for sovereign infrastructure. In space, nations like India an…
Today's briefing tracks a week of significant regulatory shifts in African fintech, with major directives from the centr…
Today on The Settlement Layer: Nigeria's central bank fleshes out its sweeping fintech regulations, imposing strict mark…
Today on The Settlement Layer: The regulatory perimeter is in focus. Building on trends we've been tracking, Nigeria's c…
Today on The Settlement Layer, we track the regulatory machinery grinding across African fintech, from Nigeria's central…
Today on The Settlement Layer, the governance layer asserts itself across the stack. We have new details on the US expor…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the agentic commerce frameworks we've tracked from Mastercard, Visa, and JD.com all shipp…
Today on The Settlement Layer: card networks race to govern AI agents, Anthropic reverses a covert safeguard policy unde…
Today on The Settlement Layer: every major payments incumbent — Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT — announced something that treat…
Today on The Settlement Layer: South Africa's Reserve Bank draws the clearest line yet between payment modernisation and…
Today on The Settlement Layer: agentic payments move from demo to production architecture across three continents, while…
Today on The Settlement Layer: Amazon makes agent-native payment rails the official default for AWS, Mastercard switches…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the week's most consequential moves in payment rails, agentic commerce, African fintech r…
Today on The Settlement Layer: a UK court affirms regulators can cap card interchange, South Africa rewires its payments…
Today on The Settlement Layer: governance infrastructure is the common thread — from AI agent authorization frameworks a…
Today on The Settlement Layer — stablecoins stop being a thesis and start being settlement infrastructure, agentic comme…
Today on The Settlement Layer: agentic payments moved from pilot to production in Europe, South Africa's regulators clos…
Today on The Settlement Layer: South Africa's Treasury moves to replace 60-year-old exchange control regulations to clos…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the agentic payments stack gets a lot more concrete — and a lot more complicated — as clo…
Today on The Settlement Layer: a card-scheme monopoly fight threatening Nigeria's 5.9 million active POS terminals, the …
Governance keeps surfacing across every payments layer this week. On The Settlement Layer today: Mastercard's BitLicense…
Today on The Settlement Layer: central banks are repricing money and rebuilding settlement infrastructure at the same ti…
Today on The Settlement Layer: central banks from Pretoria to Accra are building the next payments stack in public, agen…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the agentic commerce stack picks up three production-grade building blocks in a single we…
Today on The Settlement Layer: South Africa's central bank rewrites the rules on who can offer payment services, Kenya's…
Today on The Settlement Layer: stablecoin regulation is tightening from Frankfurt to Accra to Tokyo — but a MiCA-complia…
Today on The Settlement Layer: Orlando Pirates end a 14-year wait with the least glamorous 2-0 in recent memory, the FDI…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the UK PSR finally puts Visa and Mastercard scheme fees under mandatory disclosure, Anthr…
Today on The Settlement Layer: the agentic-payments stack keeps shipping faster than its liability framework can absorb,…
Today on The Settlement Layer: agentic commerce moved from announcements to production this week — Visa's CEMEA programm…
Today on The Settlement Layer: agent infrastructure stops being a thought experiment. Anthropic buys the SDK factory and…
Today on The Settlement Layer: agentic payments graduate from slides to live transactions, SARB extends the crypto consu…