Hello, I'm Mike Fowler. I write about the ways businesses get paid, and how to make them better.
I'm an enterprise payments leader based in Melbourne. My work spans card-present, card-not-present and account-to-account payments, and the platform integrations that bring them together inside the software businesses already use.
Here I share what I'm seeing across merchant payments, real-time rails and commerce in Australia. Practical, plain English, no hype.
What I write about
Account-to-account and PayTo
Real-time rails, the NPP and what A2A means for receivables, cash flow and cost.
Platform integrations
Embedding payments in the commerce and accounting platforms businesses run on.
Merchant acquiring
Acceptance in every channel, routing, surcharging, tokenisation and the economics underneath.
Commerce and marketplaces
How Australians shop, and how brands grow through marketplaces and digital channels.
Latest writing
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The Request Is the Transaction: Why Payments People Should Be Watching Cloudflare
Cloudflare sits in front of a fifth of the internet. As AI agents become buyers, the request becomes the transaction. What that means for acquirers, gateways and PSPs.
From Strength to Strength: Why Bunnings' Marketplace Keeps Growing
Of the Australian retailers that bolted a marketplace onto a store network, Bunnings is the only one reporting strong growth. A teardown of why it works.
Online Marketplaces in Australia: 2026
In 2022 Australia was the land of the online marketplace. Four years on, the abundance story has met a culling. The state of play, and why.
If e-commerce was a real shop, you'd close it by lunchtime
If 97 of every 100 people walked out of your store without buying, you'd shut it. Yet that store is e-commerce.
Agentic commerce, part two: the cheapest thing in retail is now the most valuable
Whether you exist in an AI agent's reasoning window comes down to one thing: product data clean enough for a machine to trust.
Agentic commerce: the funnel didn't die, it got bypassed.
The agent is the new shop window and the protocol is the new shelf. What agentic commerce means for retailers and payments.
The In-Between: Making Payments Invisible in the Age of Digital Commerce
In a well-built digital experience, payments fade into the background. On the sliver between pre-purchase and post-purchase.
Account-to-Account Payments: An American's Perspective from Australia
Australia's real-time rails are years ahead. What it would take for US banks to offer the same seamless A2A experience.