Just two days ago, on November 28, 2025, the European Central Bank (ECB) dropped some exciting news - it opened a formal selection process for partners: all banks, payment providers, wallet developers, and merchants can have a say in the pilot program of the digital euro! Europe can now create its own digital cash infrastructure instead of relying indefinitely on foreign card networks, SWIFT and U.S.-dominated big-tech wallets. Since the partner onboarding starts next year an

We are humbled to win the Most Innovative Payments and Banking Education Award from Global Banking & Finance Review . This a recognition that captures the purpose behind everything we build. Our mission is to set standards and build an ethical and transparent payment and banking industry where everyone is properly trained and informed, and no one benefits from anyone's lack of knowledge. We build the standards of payment and banking education worldwide and giving profession

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