Conferences, reports, press releases, LinkedIn posts.
The volume of industry commentary is enormous. Most of it is produced by people with something to sell, or by institutions with interests to protect, or by consultants whose next client might be the company they’re discussing.
Independent analysis, rigorous, honest, with no obligation to anyone’s commercial interests, is rarer than it should be in an industry that handles the money of hundreds of millions of people and shapes the commercial conditions of millions of businesses.
Spill the Tea on Payment exists because that gap is consequential.
Payments are not neutral infrastructure. They are governance decisions, cultural constructions, and power relationships that determine who controls value flows, who bears the cost of complexity, and whose interests the system was actually designed to serve. The industry’s story about itself obscures more than it reveals. And the people who most need a clearer account, merchants, regulators, fintechs, practitioners trying to make genuine strategic decisions, are the ones least served by the existing commentary.
This platform is an attempt to provide a clearer account. Publicly, independently, and free. Always.
Not in strategy offices but in operational roles, hands in the dirt.
Launching projects, onboarding complex merchants, installing software, reconciling data for businesses processing billions of euros.
Then as a C-level in a scale-up and Sales Leader for one of Europe’s biggest acquirers.
That experience produced two things :
The research studio and the consulting practice are both products of that conviction. The research is the public work : building and disseminating an analytical framework for understanding payments as power relationships rather than neutral infrastructure.
The consulting applies that framework privately to specific client situations.
Both are funded independently of the industry being analysed.
The current form, one person, a research studio, a consulting practice, is the bootstrapping phase.
The long-term vision is a collective independent research institution on payments and power, funded by multiple parties, open to contributors who share the analytical framework and the commitment to honest analysis, governed in the public interest rather than the industry’s.
That vision takes time and resources to build.
The platform exists now in the form it can sustain.
But every essay, every newsletter edition, every podcast conversation, every consulting engagement is building toward something more collective and more durable.
If you want to contribute, as a writer, a researcher, or a practitioner with something honest to say, the door is open.
If you want to support the research without a consulting engagement, the studio report is free, and the case studies are available to anyone.
If you think the payments industry deserves more honest analysis than it currently gets, you’re already in the right place.
The consulting practice is the sole source of revenue for the platform.
Editorial positions are never for sale and are never adjusted for commercial reasons.
This independence has a cost. It also has a value. The analysis you find here is worth reading precisely because it has no obligation to tell you what anyone wants to hear.