When’s the last time you wrote a check?

How usual was it for the other party to receive one?

And when’s the last time you received one?

Would your life be different without checks? or is it already without checks – and no looking back?

So once we’ve learned that it’s a good idea to start a blog post with questions, the first post of a new blog certainly cannot escape the recommendation!

These questions simply point to the fact that, as experts of a technology the world will no longer need in a couple of decades at most, we Panini associates often tend to see ourselves as “kings of a shrinking kingdom”.

How often have you heard the motivators’ story that in Chinese (or Japanese, depending on who tells the story) the word crisis – written in local characters – means “danger plus opportunity”? A perfect cliché for an unimaginative first blog post, isn’t it?

Well… it’s false. Which actually doesn’t change a thing! We still need to uncover new opportunities, in an evolving business landscape, and in domains which will unavoidably be more or less different from the financial documents processing world we’re very used to.

This blog is meant to help us in this quest, to bring out thoughts together and to compare them to what we see happening around us. Payments are going digital, we know that, but it’s not instant, nor universal, nor a race – rather a journey. A long one, too, full of bumps, detours, and pit-stops, with the burden of current habits, regulations and infrastructure constantly slowing things down.

Let’s take a deep breath, grab our backpack, a notepad, and start walking together.

WELCOME to Panini notes!