My background is payments. I spent 10 years at Fiserv and Clover Network Inc., close enough to the rails to learn the distance between what a press release announces and what a system actually does. Major Matters applies that habit to the current shift: I read the architecture against the announcement and name what is still missing before any of it works at scale.
I think in frameworks. The named models below are how that shows up on the page: I would rather leave you a lens you can reuse than file one more take. The ideas arrive faster than the newsletter can run them, which is most of the reason the newsletter exists.
The analysis compounds through four named frameworks, each with a permanent reference page:
- The MM Trust Layer Model: discovery, authorization, and settlement trust fail independently in agentic commerce.
- The MM Liability Gap: who initiated an agent's transaction, and who owns the loss when it goes wrong.
- The MM Destination Economy Thesis: what a merchant's owned destinations earn when the shopper is an agent.
- The MM Control Stack Compact: six verifiable frontier-AI accountability commitments, each assigned to the party that can adopt it today.
I publish near-daily. Most editions analyze one development in depth; the longer pieces map how the layers connect. Everything I write follows the standards on the methodology page: the source hierarchy and the citation and corrections rules.
If you want to know whether this publication is for you, read one framework page. If it earns your attention, subscribe. It is free.
Charlie Major is a Product Development Manager at Mastercard. The views and opinions expressed in Major Matters are his own and do not represent those of Mastercard.