Blog
Insights on building, scaling, and enforcing real-time decisions in modern data-driven systems.
Sibos 2026 was a week about the network. For me, the most important number of the week was about the bank. Over four days in Miami, from September 28 to…
Key takeaway Reported consumer fraud losses reached $15.9 billion in 2025, up nearly 430% since 2020. The biggest losses come from payments victims are persuaded to authorize themselves, and the…
Key takeaway Fraud losses keep rising despite record investment in detection, because in most financial services stacks the systems that hold state, apply decision logic and enforce outcomes are separate….
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Beyond the Network: The Real-Time Payment Realities Banks Face in 2027
Sibos 2026 was a week about the network. For me, the most important number of the week was about the…
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Fraud losses are up 430% since 2020. The window to stop them has not grown at all.
Key takeaway Reported consumer fraud losses reached $15.9 billion in 2025, up nearly 430% since 2020. The biggest losses come…
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The Systems Gap: Why the Model Is Rarely the Problem, and the Gap Between Systems Is
Fraud losses keep rising despite record investment in detection, because in most financial services stacks the systems that hold state,…
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How Fast Is VoltDB in Reality? The TPS Pitfall
Why “how many transactions per second?” is the wrong first question, and what real-world PoC data tells us about VoltDB…
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When late is wrong: Charging at real scale
I spent the best part of a decade building online charging systems before I joined Volt, and I'll let you…
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Shiny Object Syndrome: Separating Real Fintech Value from Demo-Stage Hype
FinovateFall wrapped in New York last week: three days, dozens of live demos, and an agenda dominated by AI in…
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What Turns an Agentic AI Recommendation Into an Automated Network Decision?
In June, in the middle of the World Cup, Jai Rajaraman of Ocient and I presented a webinar with STL…
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The Decisioning Layer in Financial Services: Why a Late Decision Is a Wrong Decision
The gap nobody budgets for Financial services has never been better at detecting fraud. Models are accurate, scores arrive in…
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The Kafka Tax: Where Cost, Complexity, and Latency Add Up When You Do Not Need the Full Cluster
In the first part of this series, I argued that Databricks and Snowflake are not walking away from Apache Kafka.…
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Stop Reading, Start Running: The Volt Developer Hub is Live
Introducing the Volt Active Data Developer Hub – three guided paths for Kafka, SQL, and AI-agent builders, a browser sandbox…
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Observability Sees the Past. Your Network Needs Someone to Act on the Present
If you work in network operations, financial services, or any environment running at enterprise scale, you have invested heavily in…
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The Quiet Redesign Around Kafka: What Databricks and Snowflake’s New Ingestion Bets Reveal
Apache Kafka is not going anywhere. That needs to be said plainly before anything else, because the headlines coming out…
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If your system cannot tolerate delayed enforcement, inconsistent behavior, or reconciliation after the fact, let’s start a conversation about whether a dedicated decisioning layer makes sense for your architecture.
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