One year in. One question for you.

A year ago, I decided to try something.

One audience. One issue every week. One year.

And somehow, here we are. Fifty-two weeks later.

I am pretty proud of that.

Some Wednesdays I had plenty of time to think and write. Some weeks I was traveling, buried in work, stressed, tired, or staring at a draft wondering whether I had anything useful left to say.

Basically, I had a year of being human.

But I kept showing up.

Before I start another year, I want to tell you why I have been doing this in the first place. Then I want to ask you something.

If you are trying to modernize a financial institution right now, there is no shortage of things demanding your attention.

There are too many.

AI is changing incredibly fast. Your teams are trying to understand how to use it while bad actors are using the same technology to scale attacks against you.

Stablecoins have moved from something many institutions could watch from the sidelines to something senior leaders are now being asked about in boardrooms.

Tokenized deposits. Agentic commerce. ISO 20022. Embedded finance. New regulation. New competitors. New rails.

And every one seems to come with somebody telling you that this is the thing you need to solve right now.

Meanwhile, many financial institutions are still figuring out the basics of instant payments Send.

So I can understand why senior leaders sometimes look at all of this and think:

Where exactly are we supposed to start?

Most institutions I talk to already know they need to modernize.

The hard part is figuring out what comes first, what can wait, and how to keep today’s decisions from creating tomorrow’s problems.

That is what I have been trying to help with every Wednesday.

I have spent much of my career close to what actually happens when financial services does not work the way it should.

Years ago, when I was a product manager at a Tier1 bank, I spent time sitting with agents listening to calls in the contact center. I remember watching them bounce between screen after screen, including those old green mainframe screens, trying to help a customer whose account wasn’t working or whose bill couldn’t get paid.

And while they were trying to solve the customer’s problem, there was a clock ticking and a leader board applying pressure.

More customers waiting.

I spent years digging through customer research and watching people struggle with financial products that made perfect sense to the financial institution and considerably less sense to the person using them.

I remember customers hearing the words secured credit card and assuming “secured” meant safer for them, without realizing the security was for the financial institution.

Those moments stay with you.

Later, I moved deeper into fraud and identity. I learned how institutions protect account opening, login, account maintenance and transactions, and how relentlessly bad actors look for and exploit the vulnerabilities between the controls.

Then I moved into instant payments and got to see another layer entirely.

I worked with technology teams working through payment messages and core posting. With banking teams on balances and controls. With financial institutions on governance, exceptions, fraud, liquidity and use cases. With sales and marketing teams trying to explain why any of it mattered to the financial institution and their end customer.

Then I spent three years running my own consulting business and working with financial institutions in different parts of the world.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I was focused on the wrong problem.

I did not need to keep convincing financial institutions that instant payments mattered.

Many of them had already decided that it was important.

Many were already live on Receive.

They wanted to move forward.

They just couldn’t quite get to Send.

I kept seeing the same concerns expressed over and over.

Fraud is one of them, and this is a legitimate concern. Most financial institutions are dealing with legacy architecture, and security systems built for a very different environment.

The business case was another. Who is going to use Send? For what? Where is the revenue? What problem does it solve for the customer?

And then there was the infrastructure underneath all of it.

A lot of banking technology was built for batch processing, business-day schedules and systems that had time to sync up to each other.

Instant payments do not work that way.

If money can move in seconds, your institution needs to know the balance, understand who is initiating the transaction, evaluate the risk and make the decision before the payment leaves.

I saw financial institutions solve pieces of that problem by adding new technology and capabilities around the new rails.

But that exposed another problem ...

Financial institutions were starting to build the modern version of the legacy silos that we had spent years complaining about.

A new instant payments stack over here.

A separate fraud platform for each new system introduced.

A stablecoin pilot somewhere else.

An AI initiative trying to talk to multiple in cohesive systems.

All modern.

All relatively disconnected.

That is when my view of modernization started to change.

Instant payments are much bigger than a new payment rail. They give financial institutions a reason to build capabilities they are going to need for almost everything coming next.

I write a lot about fraud, architecture, controls and things that can go wrong.

But the outcome I am trying to help you get to is actually much simpler.

I want you to reach the point where every new development does not trigger another round of panic, another new silo and another three-year transformation program.

Imagine the next new thing shows up.

Maybe it is an AI agent initiating a payment.

Maybe it is a stablecoin.

Maybe it is a tokenized deposit.

Maybe it is something we have barely started talking about yet.

And instead of asking, How on earth are we going to support this?, your institution can say:

We understand what this is. We know where it fits. We know how we govern it. We know what risks we are willing to take. And we know how money moves through our institution.

That is what success looks like to me.

A financial institution that can absorb change without having to reinvent itself every time the market moves.

An architecture of calm.

That is what I want to help you build toward.

I have been talking to you every Wednesday for a year.

Before I start the next 52, I want to listen.

Has The Instant Edge helped you?

Has something I wrote changed the way you thought about a problem?

Did it give you language for a conversation you were already having?

Did you forward an issue to somebody on your team?

Did it make instant payments, AI, stablecoins, fraud, ISO 20022 or modernization easier to understand?

Did it help you see how some of these things connect?

And what would make it more useful?

What are you dealing with that I have not covered?

What do you wish somebody would explain in plain English?

What are senior leaders inside your institution trying to make sense of right now?

What should I spend more time on next year?

Hit reply. It comes directly to me.

A sentence is enough. Seriously.

Because I have ideas about where The Instant Edge should go next.

But after 52 weeks, I would much rather hear from the people I have been writing it for.

So, one year in, here is my question:

Am I making a dent? And what would make the next year more useful to you?

Start here, one tap:

If you have two minutes, I built a short survey. Seven quick questions, most a single tap. It tells me far more than a year of guessing.

Take the 2-minute survey

Thank you! Every answer shapes what the next 52 weeks look like.

(Or just hit reply if you get this via email, as your answer comes straight to me, and one sentence is enough.)

If your leadership would benefit from this perspective in the room, I’d welcome the conversation.