Name. Image. Likeness. How student-athletes are able to receive compensation for endorsements, social media, and appearances.

Or, how student-athletes are paid to play?

On the latest episode of In Control, Richard Scioli of Analog taught me how NIL works, including how creative the compensation can become.

Unlimited BBQ for offensive linesmen? Done.

Decoldest Crawford as the face of… you got it… an air conditioning company? Done.

Richard got into it all to break down the business of college sports. We covered:

→ The three buckets of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) and how they work

→ Why college athletes setting up LLCs is now standard practice

→ How 10 people regulate 363 Division 1 schools and 175,000 athletes

→ The private equity deals reshaping athletic departments

Whenever my mum comes to the US and we go to a restaurant, she never lets her credit card out of her sight - insisting on following the waiter all the way to the register.

They always look baffled, but she might actually be onto something! In-person fraud rates in the US are much higher than in Europe.

Why is card fraud so prevalent?
We share our 16-digit card numbers everywhere - is that safe?
How do merchants actually protect this data?

To dig into all of this, I spoke to Colin Luce, CEO at Basis Theory, and it turns out there's a quiet power struggle happening.

Visa and MasterCard want merchants to rely on their tokens and delete the original card data.

Merchants don't trust what comes next.

Once you give up that data, you can't switch processors, you can't negotiate, you take whatever pricing the networks decide.

We also discussed in the podcast:

- Why agentic commerce isn't really a payments revolution
- Why MasterCard are getting rid of the PAN
- Whether consumers care about card fraud
- How your Stripe token is useless with Adyen

What do you think Delaware's third largest source of revenue is?

Props to you if you knew it was escheatment.

This is the craziest area of financial compliance I’ve learnt about in a long time, and my head is still reeling from my chat with Allen Osgood, CEO of Eisen.

What started out as me wondering what would happen to the Bitcoin that I can’t access (moved country, changed phone number…) turned into a mind bending story of a man who lost all of his Amazon stock (bye bye nice retirement), how claiming your own money back from states has become rife with fraud, and how there are $70bn of funds being held by US states that they just make money off and use to fill budget.

Madness!