All articles by Douglas Blakey
Douglas Blakey
FX: The $10bn opportunity airlines leave on the table
Travellers’ banks typically run the currency conversion despite nearly half of passengers being unaware of banks’ hidden cross-currency fees. It’s a poor customer experience and a major lost revenue opportunity for airlines, says Damian Alonso
2026: The year BFSI shifts from modernisation ambition to governed intelligence
Pablo Cella explains why 2026 represents a pivotal year for the banking, financial services and insurance sector
The E&I advantage: Why Swift’s 2027 requirements could be a turning point for banks
Cian Fernando explains why banks that adopt native processing early will gain faster, more resilient operations, while those waiting until the 2027 deadline risk falling behind
Rebuilding payments around the merchant: A new standard for payments
Robert Kraal draws on over 20 years of experience building global acquiring and processing services at Adyen and Worldpay, and now co-founding Silverflow, a cloud-native payments platform designed to reduce cost and complexity while enabling innovation
Why the path to scalable stablecoins starts with onchain privacy
While stablecoins will keep growing – helped by soaring demand for digital dollars and US Treasury exposure – privacy remains the missing multiplier, particularly for large enterprises, explains Jason Delabays
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Latin America’s push for financial inclusion is reshaping the region’s payments landscape
Therese Hudak explores the transformation of Latin America’s payments landscape through inclusion-driven innovation and the strategic importance of local payment methods for cross-border merchants
Payments failures are discovered by customers, not systems
Dr Gulzar Singh examines how payments failures are most often detected outside institutional monitoring layers, and why customer, merchant, and dispute signals typically surface breakdowns before internal metrics respond
Why payments metrics give false comfort
Dr Gulzar Singh takes a payments-led, production-focused view of how performance is interpreted at scale, and why institutions often misread health by measuring flow rather than repair
The bank of tomorrow is built on payments reconciliation
Most payment systems do not fail loudly – they fail quietly, writes Dr Gulzar Singh
European tech investments: December signals that defined 2025
December highlights include AI’s move from advisory tools to execution-driven and agentic systems and DeepTech’s shift from isolated breakthroughs to institutional pipelines. Expert analysis from Zubr Capital’s Oleg Khusaenov