I’ve spent years working with payment operations teams, and one pattern always emerges: by the time a chargeback hits your merchant account, you’ve already lost. Not just the transaction amount, but also the product, shipping costs, and a $25–$100 chargeback fee. The damage compounds when you factor in dispute ratios that can trigger monitoring programs like...

TL;DR: 3D Secure (3DS) authentication adds an extra verification layer between you, your bank, and the merchant during online payments. The latest version (3DS2) uses risk-based analysis to verify transactions invisibly in 95% of cases, only prompting you when fraud risk is detected. It’s mandatory in Europe under PSD2 and increasingly adopted in the US to combat card-not-present...

I’ve spent the last decade working with high-risk merchants, and I’ve watched countless businesses celebrate revenue growth while secretly bleeding money. The culprit? A fundamental misunderstanding of what profitability actually means when you’re processing thousands of transactions daily. Last month, I talked to a supplement company doing $2.3 million in monthly revenue....

📊 Why 81% of analytics users are ditching standalone tools for embedded solutions The Analytics Revolution is Here (And It’s Massive) The embedded analytics market just hit a turning point. We’re talking about explosive growth from $78.53 B to $182.72 B by 2033 — that’s a staggering 18.4% CAGR that’s reshaping how every SaaS application delivers insights. But...

Data agility — not just marketing budgets — will determine which CPG brands win in 2025. McKinsey’s analysis shows that CPG companies implementing comprehensive digital and AI transformations can achieve a five- to 15-percentage-point impact on EBITDA margins, while AI is expected to generate $500 billion in value for the global CPG industry by 2025. The...

Most companies are still fighting yesterday’s battles while smart organizations gain unfair advantages from tools nobody’s talking about yet. I watched a $50M company waste six months evaluating Tableau vs. Power BI while their scrappy competitor used an emerging platform to gain market-defining insights in just three weeks. The difference wasn’t the data — it...

Why 67% of AI implementations fail and what successful organizations do differently The AI analytics gold rush is creating two types of companies: those gaining massive competitive advantages and those burning through budgets with little to show for it. After analyzing over 200 implementations across industries, I’ve identified exactly what separates success from expensive...

When I first started working with CPG industry companies five years ago, I assumed digital transformation would follow the same playbook we used for tech startups and financial services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. CPG digital transformation presents unique challenges that distinguish it from every other industry I’ve worked with. While a software company can pivot its...

Three months ago, I sat in a hospital boardroom listening to a CMO describe their biggest challenge: “We’re flying blind. By the time we see problems in our data, patients have already suffered.” That conversation changed everything about how I approach data analytics in healthcare. It wasn’t just about numbers on dashboards — it was about saving lives through...