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OpenPISP

Working papers

The OpenPISP series.

A sequence of short papers that diagnose the structural problem with the current payment market and describe what an open alternative actually looks like.

Series 1 — Diagnosis

  1. 01 SMTP for Money: Why Payments Need an Open Protocol The internet solved the equivalent coordination problem for communications in the 1980s. Payments — arguably the most important form of digital exchange — remain stubbornly, expensively proprietary.
  2. 02 The Invisible Passenger Intermediaries have always charged for the trust they provide. The modern payment network changed something the others didn't: the terms stopped being legible.
  3. 03 Open Banking's Missing Layer A decade after PSD2, Open Banking exists, it works — and almost nothing changed. The reason isn't in the technology or the regulation. It's in the incentives.
  4. 04 The Chargeback Trap A mechanism designed in 1974 to build trust between merchants and customers is, half a century on, quietly destroying it — not through bad intentions, but through structure.
  5. 05 The Trust Tax The trusted third party that mediates between merchant and customer quietly expanded its role far beyond what either party sanctioned — and charges both for the privilege.

Series 2 — Prescription

  1. 01 Not a Revolution. An Alternative. The goal is not to make card networks obsolete. It is to make them optional.
  2. 02 Dispute Resolution: A System That Actually Works Building a genuine alternative to the card networks requires building a genuine alternative to the chargeback. Not a better version of the same mechanism — a different mechanism, designed for the job it actually needs to do.
  3. 03 Commercial Coherence: How the Scheme Sustains Itself Every participant has to have a rational reason to join and stay. The commercial architecture of an open scheme works because it separates governance from commercial flow — by design, not by coincidence.

Series 3 — Solution

  1. 01 A Payment A market trader stops needing a card terminal — and a customer pays in seconds without leaving the moment.
  2. 02 An Invoice An architecture practice stops chasing payment on every project — and the cash-flow conversation changes shape.
  3. 03 The Dog Walker Six households, four payment habits, one walker — and the chaos becomes a single arrangement that just works.
  4. 04 A Standing Arrangement An eighty-three-member football club replaces a treasurer's annual chase with one persistent agreement that quietly does its job.
  5. 05 The School Eleven years of school trip collection, dinner money, and chasing parents — replaced by something that carries no admin tax.
  6. 06 The Cancellation A subscription that should have stopped didn't. Then it did — without a phone call, a chat window, or a fight.
  7. 07 A Dispute A dining table arrives broken. A real disagreement, resolved by a real process — not by a bank's two-day silence and a thirty-pound chargeback fee.
  8. 08 The Festival Twenty-five-minute queues for wristband top-ups disappear when the wristband is itself a payment endpoint.
  9. 09 A PISP The view from inside a payment firm that operates the scheme — what changes when the protocol is the thing you implement, not the thing you fight.
  10. 10 A Network Eighteen months in, a payer has stopped thinking about how she pays. That is what the scheme is for.