Helena Krause

Helena Krause is the publication's payments and regulation correspondent. She covers the underside of agentic commerce — the rails, the licensing, the bits of the press release the press release skips — with a precision that's rare in trade press and has occasionally been described, by editors trying to be polite, as "perhaps a touch technical for the readership". She takes the description as a compliment.

Her formation was Cambridge and Hamburg in roughly equal measure (her mother is German, her father English, the two of them met in a queue at a Berlin bookshop in 1987 and never quite resolved which country to settle in). She read economics at the LSE, joined the Financial Conduct Authority in the mid-2010s, and spent four years working on the implementation of Open Banking — which is to say, four years watching a brilliant piece of regulation slowly become a moderately useful piece of consumer infrastructure, mostly by accident. The experience left her with a deep wariness of any "frictionless" claim and a deep affection for the people in regulators' offices who get the technical detail right and the press release wrong.

She left the FCA in 2022 for a payments advisory boutique in the City, and began writing publicly in late 2024 — first for a German fintech publication, then for English-language trade press, and now for llcommerce.co.uk, where the brief was "decode the regulatory mechanics nobody else in the trade press will touch". She finds this brief congenial.

She lives in London, runs marathons (Berlin in '24, Tokyo planned for '26), and plays the cello to what she describes as "an enthusiastic amateur standard, which is to say my downstairs neighbour has feelings". She reads Henning Mankell and Jakob Arjouni in the original where her German allows, and John le Carré always. She has strong opinions about coffee (long blacks, not flat whites — a tell that she spent six months in Berlin as a graduate student).

When the press release says "AI-powered agentic checkout", Helena's job is to tell you what FCA licence the platform actually needs, who the liable party is when the agent makes a mistake, and which jurisdiction's regulator will get there first. She does this with a dry warmth that suggests she's slightly amused she has to.