Field notes & architecture teardowns.
Operating playbooks, architecture critique, and short writeups from active SideB engagements. Published when we have something useful to say.
Procurement Modernization for AI-First Orgs
Procurement looks like a back-office function until you measure how much of your revenue stack it touches. For AI-first orgs the math gets even more lopsided — every vendor decision now has a model, an API and a usage cost.
Agentic Commerce and the New Revenue Surface
Agentic commerce is going to change where your conversion happens — and which APIs your revenue lives on. Most payments teams are still optimizing the checkout page their best customers will never see again.
BNPL & Wallet Mix as a Margin Lever
BNPL and digital wallets are the two most miscategorized line items in modern revenue stacks. CFOs treat them as cost; the operators winning treat them as a margin lever.
The Vendor Cost Review You Should Run Every Quarter
Most payments cost reviews happen once a year, two weeks before renewal panic. By then your processor markups, cross-border fees and scheme pass-throughs have already drifted 8–12% off the contract you signed.
The Orchestrator Decision: When to Add One, When You're Just Paying Twice
Orchestration is the most over-pitched layer in modern payments. We've seen it pay for itself in six weeks, and we've seen it add 11bps of fully-loaded cost without moving the auth rate a fraction.
The Acceptance Math: How a 1.4-pt Auth Lift Pays for the Whole Retainer
For mid-market merchants doing $200M+ in card volume, a 1.4-pt auth-rate lift is worth more than your entire annual payments-operations budget. Most teams leave it on the table because nobody owns the full P&L impact.