Welcome to the eleventh edition of La Crème de la Crème!
Let’s start with the audio bit - the bonbon 🍬
You know the deal by now: every month I record a short (or not) audio to share what’s going on behind the scenes, what triggered some of the ideas, what made me rant, and what I kept out of the written version.
I elaborate a bit more on the unified commerce illusion series after the introduction, end of October, and also use this audio to do a retrospective of 2025 for Spill the Tea on Payment
Scroll down for the rest of the newsletter👇
ASK THE MENU !
🫖 Boil the Water — Airwallex or the company that survived the industry game of bluff…
As usual, because I won’t follow the lead of all the analysts in this industry, I will not congratulate Airwallex on their millions raised or their multi-billion valuation
I am more interested in the brutal honesty of their CEO, who decided to use LinkedIn to spill a stronger tea than I will ever do. See hereunder…
Ouch… It says something about the predation instinct of some, ready to absorb their competitors and the promise of others, but not ready to assume the hardest part, and the operational reality.
Surviving this game takes guts. I praise the courage of this founder to expose the bumpy road it is to create a business in Payments, far from the clickbait and flashy articles, the roundtables and amuse-bouche from the cocktail parties. The reality is here without making up. We need more leaders like this in this industry. More accountable to their team, more transparent to the market reality.
🍪 Biscuit of the Month: What you missed on LinkedIn
The biscuits of this month are full of unified commerce illusion chunks, but I still managed to publish a couple of non-related pieces.
I have decided this month to talk about two pieces that worked « well »
🤖 The one on agentic commerce
During the week for Tech for Retail in Paris, we have witnessed an inflation of noise around agentic commerce, aligning with the pre-black Friday time when the media talked a lot about agentic commerce and the launch by OpenAI of the latest GPT, including shopping functionalities.
My takeaway: slow down! I already analysed the unified commerce illusion (I strongly encourage you to read the second episode of the arc, I feel like a prophet). We are pursuing the same pattern :
hype inflation from the ecosystem
excessive monetisation from providers
deluded expectations from retailers
Retailers don’t question their model but rather expect a saviour. A full blog post will be published in the coming months on that! I told you I worked hard.
🛒 The one introducing my third blog article on Chinese E-commerce
Ah, China, China and China…
Be prepared to hear a lot about China in the coming months. I elaborated a little bit more on the audio bonbon, see above.
LInk here (click), i can’t embed it, because of the extra delicate carousel
The last part of my series, this carousel explained to introduce the blog post, that Chinese e-commerce incumbents come in different flavours, and they can be classified with some specificities. Talking about Temu, Shein being the Chinese evil retailers lacks a reality check, but also reveals the structural weakness of the current retail scene in Europe.
On that matter, you can relate to the repost (link here) I did that shares interesting insights on how Asia is taking the European Retail scene by storm. Lovely.
☕ Sip of the Month — Unified Commerce illusion to be continued
November has been a key release month of three core essays to develop my concept of « unified commerce illusion ». Those three essays follow a coherent narrative arc.
(I also elaborated a bit on the broader thesis of this unified commerce in my bonbon, don’t miss it. Still above)
1rst essay: « Retail Is in Crisis, and Payments Took Advantage of It » focuses on how Retail these recent years has got into a deep crisis of meaning.
This crisis of meaning, of raison d’être, made the business of the payments industry. The more Retailers entered into a vicious circle of existential questioning, the more the payments industry rebranded as a saviour of commerce and sell complexity.
2nd essay: « Omnichannel Is a Governance Problem, Not a Customer Journey » explains that unified commerce is first and foremost a governance issue.
The Payments industry started monetising its omnichannel solution based on an extractive model for merchants, fueled by VCs expectations, while explaining that Merchants must remove frictions from CX. The governance issue was not fixed, and for some part of retailers' governance has been outsourced to the Payments Industry as part of the solution sold by the Industry3rd essay « When China Unified Commerce for Real » shows how Chinese E-commerce by the persistence of its unified ecosystem and platform economy, achieves a « post payments (or checkout) world ».
Merchants are better empowered, but this model crashes when new incumbents like Temu or Shein enter European markets, where the logic is still the one from the scheme and their ecosystems of providers. They must pay the « toll »
Release of the gated free part of my case study I have promised for three months (I started in September) should be out in a matter of days, according to my plan.
I got several delays (see the retrospective hereunder to understand, and also 🐶 my furry friend that got a severe injury to the paw, needing surgery and constant supervision).
🍰 Big Piece of Cake — Spill my Retrospective of the year 2025
Those who follow me have surely noticed the evolution of Spill the Tea on Payment. I talked a little bit about this newsletter in the previous edition. But I was interested in giving a bit of a detailed overview of what it’s like to be an independent consultant in the Payment Industry
Back in time, a little flashback moment
I have started this venture end of 2023, playing the game of content creation on LinkedIn and adopting a brutally honest tone to talk about the Payments Industry. It was my identity, the guy who wears pink and says b***hy stuff. It allowed me to get a couple of assignments (mainly training and coaching), and a lot of people came to me to do :
Business Development job: Opening the doors to introduce them somewhere
Sales Job: Selling their payment solution to my audience or getting commissioned
Content Writing/Copywriting job: Writing some content on the Payments Industry
I refused those jobs, because I wanted to get an outsider view on the industry, I cannot publish brutally honest criticism and trying to sell solutions. No, not in my value system.
Then, an Eureka moment
So my year 2025 has been catastrophic in terms of business development for my own profit (and I am transparent and brutally honest as usual😅) to the point I started to wonder why it did not work, I played the LinkedIn ego game and got no reward or so few, I was not in the who’s who of « Payment Influencer ».
July was a pivot month for me, and I started to work on intellectual depth rather than noise, focusing on my blog, on what I wanted to say, and stopping searching to play the influence game.
This year (especially the second part) was incredibly rich in terms of idea development, theoretical and structural framework, and I finally found a place where I felt myself, where I did not have to play the sales agent or the influencer. It was this moment that I felt I had left my former life and embraced a new one.
A media? Breaking news! I am not…
Whereas some people might think I am a sort of media, I am not. I barely comment on headlines and am not interested in analysing them per se. Business comments and analysis, and indiscretion from C-level are not my cup of tea. What interests me is not investigation as well, I will never disclose breaking scandals or promoting the system indirectly through interviews. I am not a journalist.
The reason why when I launched Tea for Two and Two for Tea, I interviewed two people who spoke without many filters. I thank them for accepting the challenge. I am really happy with the depth of the conversations.
They were here to have a conversation that happens to be filmed. But this interview game reinforced my intuition that I was not here to produce content on an industrial scale. I am a slow burner, not a sprint runner. The reason why season 1 of Tea for Two and Two for Tea was short and also because my treasury did not allow me to interview more people.
Being Free to speak and independent comes at a cost… Less visibility in Industry
I also discovered by centring my analysis on Payment as a System, and not being the guy who « comments nastily on the Industry, but gets rewards behind ». I alienated part of the industry who felt attacked ad nominem, or feared reacting to my posts.
My LinkedIn reach collapsed, but I feel way more aligned with who I am and who I want to be. I prefer depth over noise.
Those who see it this way are too short-sighted, and it says something about this industry. People fear to engage, fear to speak out, fear for their jobs. Someone told me in private, « I could write in your blog but I am searching for a job ». It says all.
Payments as a System, i love to intellectualise
But, I am seeing the Payments Industry as a system, and like every system, there are dynamics. This is what interests me. I try to stay independent to help people decipher the matrix (Reason I stopped offering sponsorship on my website, no one came anyway). Deciphering the matrix does not mean educating and describing the system, but giving more interpretation of the whole system and explaining the relationship of Power, the Geopolitical Theatre and other aspects. Those interpretations are purely personal.
Spill the tea evolved now into a mature consulting practice on the Payments Industry, but doubled down on the analysis part; it is now the embryo of an independent Think Tank on the Payments Industry and its dynamics, something pretty new, and the figures speak for themselves.
In short, little proud moment, Spill the tea this year is :
24 blog posts since February, totalling more than 26k words on various themes. Roughly, I wrote a mini-book in a year. 66 A4 pages with an average per post of 1300 words
One mini intervention at MoneyMotion in Zagreb, I was not paid. I paid for my expenses besides the ticket to the venue.
My blog views total will be around 1100 (without paid ad or whatever, and entirely made by myself), with visitors from 52 countries
2 podcast episodes and videos from my first season Tea for Two and Two for Tea
A monthly newsletter, « La Creme de la Crème »
Two thematic series, « Unified Commerce Illusion » and « Iced Tea » to better deep dive in the payment industry.
I volunteered for a 45 min class to university students to better understand industry dynamics
More than 80 LinkedIn posts… Original contents, right outside my head, sometimes completely failed, sometimes great success. As usual with Linked’in algorithm
So yeah, I am proud of what I could do by myself, without a limited budget and limited assistance. It has been a tough year, but I feel way more mature and lucid about myself and this industry.
🧁 Closing Crumbs
Next month, I will for sure talk about my case study!
You still can drop a line on [email protected]. I will read it with interest.
See you next year, enjoy the festive time and your beloved.
And don’t forget to sign up to BeeHiiv, but only if you love me, you benchmark me, you copy me, (you hate me, that’s fine too. )