The Green Sheet Online Edition
December 22, 2025 • 25:12:02
As payments evolve, so must our story
As payments professionals gather for the holidays, we reminisce about humble beginnings. Origin stories of basement brands that scaled into global enterprises never get old but some of our own brand stories and sales pitches are getting past their sell-by dates. Maybe it's time to think about our own origins, as ISOs and merchant level salespeople (MLSs).
Thirty years ago, the job was simple: help merchants break free from legacy, paper-heavy systems. Today, it's different. Payments play a small but critical role in secure, agile, intelligent enterprise systems. Savvy MLSs have pivoted from pitching processing to helping merchants navigate data, risk, automation, and customer experience.
Over time, the massive conversion from paper to electronic transactions was complete and payment processing became as commonplace as oil, gas, and water. During this process, ISOs and MLSs evolved from an army of acquisition into an army of occupation. An occupying army's job is to provide governance and strengthen infrastructure by keeping merchants productive, profitable and safe from potential attacks. And we're doing it well. Card brands are constantly improving payment rails, tightening security, and mitigating risk, helping MLSs keep merchants secure, efficient, on point and on brand.
Artisanal intelligence
AI is powerful if you know how to use it. As I've learned from experts, you can't just strap it on and expect to fly past the competition.
AI business growth strategist Laurent Cochet [www.linkedin.com/in/laurentcochet/] is founder and CEO of AI Interconnect [aiinterconnect.com/] and host of the AI Interconnect podcast [www.youtube.com/@AI-InterConnect]. In my recent guest appearance on the show, I shared some of my experiences as a journalist covering AI topics and writer using AI tools.
"I write about AI more than I use AI," I said, adding that AI can help with snappy headlines and taglines but is not the best resource for long form content. It's like talking to a firehose that spews out massive streams of data and begins a story at the end, eliminating the narrative arc. For these reasons, I encourage clients to give me raw thoughts and resist using AI, which creates extra work for me.
I'm probably not the only content creator who's frustrated by the passive voice and stifling uniformity of AI-written stories. The irony of seeing this in the payments trade is that we've come so far from the stultifying sameness of countertop terminals, which merchants could have in any color as long as it was black (thanks, Henry Ford). Here we are again, writing as militantly as we used to pay at checkout stands.
We can't say the same things and expect different outcomes. In this payments renaissance, where merchants and consumers can transact anywhere on anything, features and benefits have become commoditized. How many times have you heard that a solution can save you time and money, raise efficiencies and lower margins? We're all saying the same thing. Let's double down on things that make us unique as humans and brands.
AI-first companies
I was excited to hear Sam Sharma, [www.linkedin.com/in/samsconsultant/], founder of Elevate AI Tech [elevateaitech.com/], say it's time to move on from productivity to the very things that make us unique. He wasn't talking content; he was talking tech. He wasn't just talking companies; he was talking nation building.
In his Oct. 22, 2025, address to UK's Universal Peace Federation, "Building the Future with AI First," Sharma encouraged the audience to build a world of prosperity, peace and shared progress with AI-first, not AI-assisted, tech. AI-first companies are built differently than AI-enhanced companies, he explained.
AI-first teams are disciplined in ethics and compliance and use homegrown proprietary data to train prototypes. Those prototypes continuously evolve into complex, autonomous systems. Their use of native intelligence gives AI-first brands a hometown advantage over AI-enhanced firms built on third-party data that retrofit intelligence into legacy systems.
"Whatever you believe about AI is exactly how you're going to shape your families, your businesses, your communities, and your country," Sharma stated.
These insights helped me see content creation as grist in the mill, not only for training large language models and rules-based systems, but for building companies and nations. As the gap widens in the fintech race, and AI-first brands continue to pull ahead, it makes sense to look inward for those unique yet universal stories that are ours alone to tell. 
Editorial Note: Dale S. Laszig published this article on her Substack page, https://substack.com/@dsldirect, on Nov. 26, 2025. The Green Sheet is sharing it with permission.
Dale S. Laszig, content strategy director at The Green Sheet and founder and CEO at DSL Direct, is a payments industry journalist, creator and consultant. Connect via email at dale@dsldirectllc.com and LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/dalelaszig.
Notice to readers: These are archived articles. Contact information, links and other details may be out of date. We regret any inconvenience.
