Webinar: The Price of Surcharging
How Rising Payment Fees Create Complex Legal & Compliance Risks for Payments and Software Companies A panel discussion on surcharging and payment cost recovery with Ben Brown (Partner, Flagship Advisory Partners), Mira Boora (Co-Founder and COO, Yeeld), Theresa Kananen (Partner, Arnall Golden Gregory), and Frank Martien (Founder and Managing Partner, Windward Strategy). Together, we explored […]
Flagship Market Tracker: Agentic Commerce August 2026
Agentic commerce has continued to evolve over the last six months. Adobe data shows AI-driven traffic to travel and retail merchants reached new highs in Q2 (but to be fair, it’s still less than 1% of total retail visits), and AI-referred visitors now stay longer, bounce less, and spend more than traditional traffic. Our research […]
US Credit Card Issuing Industry KPIs Q2’26
Underwriting Discipline Continues to Hold Credit Losses at Bay The second quarter of 2026 brought broad improvement in bank credit card performance, with net credit losses declining across both credit card-focused and diversified banks. Card-focused issuers improved fastest, shedding 21 bps to reach 4.5%, though they still carry roughly 100 bps more loss than their […]
The Invoice Is the Fintech Rail: How Europe’s E-Invoicing Mandates Rewire B2B Payments
Those who think of Europe’s B2B e-invoicing mandates as just a tax-compliance software upgrade have clearly gotten it wrong. Beyond the compliance burden, these mandates unlock a larger commercial opportunity: making structured, machine-readable transaction data ubiquitous and cost-effective to access. This data layer is also the missing precondition for two propositions that have been stuck […]
Tokenized Deposits: Everyone Is Building, Almost No One Is Connecting
Tokenized deposits are having their moment. Following the surge of stablecoins, banks and financial institutions worldwide are announcing coalitions, forming consortia, or already running live solutions to bring deposits, securities, and payments on-chain. Tokenized Money Maturity Landscape (select initiatives, not comprehensive) More than half (52%) of the top-50 U.S. banks are now evaluating or implementing […]
Podcast: Building Europe’s Payment Alternative, A conversation with EPI CEO, Martina Weimert
“We want to offer one tool for all payment use cases.” As Europe pushes to build a homegrown alternative to Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, what will it actually take to win consumer trust and merchant adoption at scale? In our latest podcast, Martina Weimert, CEO of EPI, explains how the digital wallet Wero is expanding […]
The Stablecoin Promise in Cross-Border Payments: Real, but Not Uniform
Of all the use cases where stablecoins have emerged, cross-border payments have the clearest product-market fit. But that fit is not uniform; it is concentrated in specific corridors, specific transaction types, and operating models. Cross-border payments remain one of the most friction-laden, expensive, and opaque segments of global finance. Businesses wait three to ten days […]
Flagship Market Monitor: Credit Issuing Q1 2026
Credit products are being repositioned as the front end of broader financial and commercial platforms, as issuers and fintechs compete less on headline rewards and more on the ecosystem around the card, including travel, lifestyle, expense tooling, and increasingly AI. Q1 2026 brought a wave of premiumization: higher fees anchored to richer benefits, non-traditional spend […]
Q1 2026 SaaS+Fintech Earnings Observations
SaaS and fintech equities have rallied over the past month yet remain laggards to the broader market over the past year. Despite the choppy stock performance, the fundamentals tell a story of continued strength. Average revenue growth accelerated slightly, and gross profit margins continued to expand in the most recent quarter, marking the 11th straight […]
Executive Interview with Martina Weimert, CEO, EPI: “We want to offer one tool for all payment use cases”
Flagship Advisory Partners’ Executive Interview Series provides readers with exclusive insights from thought leaders in the payments and fintech industry.
This edition spotlights EPI (European Payments Initiative) and its digital wallet, Wero. Flagship Advisory Partners spoke with Martina Weimert, CEO of EPI, to discuss Wero’s geographic expansion, the role of banks in driving Wero adoption, and the broader ambition to build a sovereign pan-European payment alternative.