The big question on everybody’s mind is “how will this end?” This is a very, very complicated and professionally risky question for us to try to answer at this early stage but … we like a challenge and, given that we’ve been covering Iran for nearly a decade for clients, we have… Read more…

There’s a military practice called Effects Based Planning; first, determine your desired outcome, or effect, then choose the course of action and tool that will generate that effect. Right now, Iran is demonstrating mastery of this approach. Remember that this is a regime that has had a long, long, long time to… Read more…

Iran’s strikes on GCC nations were not a mistake. Various commentators have been declaring that Iran has made a vast mistake in firing missiles and drones into the UAE and KSA, amongst other neighbours. Now, they say, GCC nations that previously had banned US forces from using bases in their territory and… Read more…

Well, as we predicted in our article “Crunch Time For Iran?” the USA and Israel have indeed begun attacking Iran, and on the very weekend that we forecast they would. At this early stage, we want to dig into two key messages that have emerged and which are highly telling. The first… Read more…

We’ve all been watching the build-up of US forces in the Middle East over the last few weeks, threatening to attack Iran unless the Ayatollah’s regime bow to numerous, steep demands including the handover of all enriched Uranium to the US, no renewed enrichment, and the total destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities,… Read more…

Perched on a rock in stormy seas, trident still in hand but shoulders heavy, watching two shores drift further apart on either horizon. On one side? Washington – still powerful, still loud but increasingly transactional. On the other? Brussels and Berlin – slowly, methodically, talking the language of autonomy, sovereignty and strategic… Read more…

Why Cash-Dependent Economies May Be Structurally More Shock-Resilient While Europe examines the risks of going cashless, much of the emerging world never made that transition in the first place. This was not because of a technological lag. It was because of underlying economic conditions. Currency volatility, institutional trust gaps, informality and infrastructure… Read more…

Part IV of a four part series As part of our series covering payments and overarchingly focusing on how Europe is pushing to improve its autonomy from a transatlantic relationship that has become less predictable and more politically contingent, we now focus on the pharmaceutical sector. In March 2025 the European Commission… Read more…

Part III of a four part series Tourism, trade and the geopolitics of acceptance The global payments system is no longer converging. It is fragmenting. For decades, the question of how tourists paid abroad was largely settled. A handful of global card networks acted as universal translators, smoothing transactions across borders with… Read more…

Part II of a four part series Why Europe, Egypt and China are solving different problems The global debate about payments is often framed as a technical one. Faster transfers. Better apps. Cheaper fees. In reality, payments systems reveal something far more political – what states want control over, and why. Europe’s… Read more…

(Part I of a series) Why optionality, not disruption, is the real prize Europe talks a great deal about strategic autonomy. In payments, it is finally beginning to practice it. For decades, the basic act of paying – sending money, settling transactions, moving value across borders – has depended on infrastructure owned… Read more…