This post is adapted from a post on my LinkedIn profile.

A month after leaving California, the hotel and car hire still haven’t finalised the charge on my credit card. Both are still sitting as pending authorisations.

This is normal in the US, but it’s astonishing when you’re used to the UK and Europe, where card payments settle in a day or two at most, and instant payment notifications are quite common.

It also captures a paradox of Californian tech. I could ride in a Waymo with no driver through steep, messy streets in San Franciso. Yet the payments infrastructure struggles to do something as basic as clearing a bill.

We talk a lot about learning from Silicon Valley. But sometimes the lesson runs the other way. Britain’s payments and fintech infrastructure is an order of magnitude faster, cleaner and more reliable. That’s an asset we rarely celebrate.

Are we too quick to idolise visible innovation while undervaluing the invisible systems that already work?