All articles by Douglas Blakey

Douglas Blakey

The hidden costs of inefficient cash application and how modern teams are finally fixing them

Steve Markle explains why past cash application automation approaches have failed and how only context-aware, adaptive intelligence can deliver reliably and at scale

From transaction to experience: Embedding value at checkout

Scott Dawson explains how the future of payments lies in ‘embedded value’ – enhancing the checkout experience with practical, customer-focused functionality

Advancing Europe’s payments system: From commitment to capability

Kelly Devine sets out Mastercard’s approach to strengthening Europe’s payments system around five core ideas: Stability,standards, security, seamlessness and success

Why speed, not tokens, will shape the next phase of payments

Kevin Zeman explains why stablecoins have struggled to meet enterprise needs in practice and sets out the capabilities businesses actually require to support instant, cross-border payouts

Europe’s Agentic commerce shift: Why AI agents are set to become economic actors

Hanah-Marie Darley discusses what it what it means when AI agents transact under delegated authority and why permissions and governance must travel with the agent — not sit in stagnant policy documents

How the Middle East conflict develops will determine the long-term remittance business from the Gulf states

The development of the conflict in the Middle East will determine the longer-term outlook for the remittance service providers that serve the expatriate worker community from South Asia and the Philippines, writes Arnie Cho

Tokenised deposits: infrastructure not experimentation will define next phase of bank-to-bank payments

Radi El Haj discusses the potential for tokenised deposits to transform bank-to-bank payments

The critical role payment service providers will play in making agentic commerce reliable and trusted

Gertjan Dewaele sets out what Agentic Commerce means and why it matters now, how AI agents transform consumer purchasing journeys and the implications for retailers, marketers, and payment ecosystems

Fast funds, familiar controls: How stablecoins fit into everyday payments

Tim Joslyn argues that the strategic choice facing banks today isn’t whether to adopt stablecoins, but how to add them without building a second operational stack

Yaspa Index reveals Pay by Bank wake-up call

Kate Marsden, chief marketing officer of Yaspa, discusses the key findings of the second annual Yaspa Index with RBI editor Douglas Blakey