From the 1920s Great Depression to the Gold Standard, Bretton Woods, and the 2022 Terra/FTX collapse, history keeps teaching the same lesson: we cannot replace the banking system; we can only polish it into something better. By the late 2000s, many people understood that commercial banks create money when they lend and started to lose trust in centralized institutions. Crypto came as the utopian thinking that often returns after collapses: decentralized networks would remove

In this recent webinar by The Soltesz Institute , I talked to Anastasia Zencika  about the shortage of properly trained operational talent and the absence of any shared, reliable standard for education in this field. We talked about how most professionals in payments and banking still learn on the job from colleagues, sales pitches and conferences, and how this creates a costly foundation for businesses that move millions - inefficiently! We also discussed why companies strug

Roughly 150 million people receive salaries directly into their bank accounts. Annual wages are more than $11.7 billion dollars, and this huge amount is also predictable; it arrives in a steady cycle that shapes the daily liquidity of thousands of financial institutions. Payroll is a dream for banks: salary deposits are huge, low risk, and tie customers to their banks for years. But stablecoin rails all of a sudden interrupt this pattern because they settle instantly and redi

International payments still rely on old systems full of gaps, guesswork, and missing sender details - this creates a huge risks for companies to move money across borders every day. The transition to ISO 20022 forces every business to face a new digital structure where incomplete data can trigger frozen accounts and serious operational losses. Stablecoins and traditional banking today work side by side, but if a business fails to understand how these channels interact, they

Everywhere we look today, new payment providers or neobanks seem to appear overnight, each promising faster onboarding, lower fees, and better technology. Most companies offering banking or payment solutions today are not based on real user or business needs but rather on the lack of knowledge that users have about how payments and banking actually work. FinTech is business and their sales teams are trained to sell functions which businesses either won’t need or could get els

Viktoria Soltesz , the Founder of the Soltesz Institute  had a chat with Reagan Cook , a Digital Asset Compliance Expert at TaxBit . The discussion was highlighting what digital asset information reporting really means for Web3 companies, exchanges, payment providers, and traditional financial institutions that already touch crypto in one way or another. The conversation walked through the new global rules around CARF and DAC8, the practical burden on finance and technology t