Payments
Where the FX Markup Hides in Cross-Border Payments
Cross-border card and wire payments stack several markups — issuer spread, network assessment, processor margin, and dynamic currency conversion of 2 to 5…
Author
Naomi Bergman
Naomi Bergman covers the systems that move money, and the small design decisions inside them that quietly decide who gets served. She explains payment rails and credit scoring, covers federal rulemaking and the national record, and reads markets from release to close.
Articles by Naomi Bergman
Finance News
What March 2026 CPI Showed: Gasoline Drove a 0.9% Monthly Jump
The BLS reported on April 10, 2026 that headline CPI rose 0.9% in March on a 21.2% gasoline surge, lifting the 12-month rate to 3.3% while core ran at 2.6%.
Payments
What Payment Orchestration Layers Actually Do for Merchants
Payment orchestration sits between checkout and processors, choosing a provider per transaction, surviving outages, retrying soft declines and unifying…
Innovation
How Machine Learning Models Score Payment Fraud in Real Time
Fraud models assemble device, velocity and behavioral signals into a score returned inside the authorization window, while Regulation B and CFPB circulars…
Finance News
How Credit Card APRs Track the Prime Rate When the Fed Cuts
Variable card APRs reprice automatically off the prime rate - 6.75% since the December 2025 cut and unchanged through the Fed's January and March 2026 holds -…