Meta’s AI Move: From Ad Network to Agentic Preference Layer

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A reader comment last week pushed on the Meta AI question. The short version: Meta isn’t trying to own agentic commerce (a smart play given merchant control), and what they are doing is more interesting than most people are giving them credit for.

The Architecture Is Already Set

First, a quick recap of where we stand. The winning model in agentic commerce is the retailer-owned specialist agent. Walmart’s Sparky, Amazon’s Rufus (now Alexa Shopping), Michaels’ Ask Mike. The merchant keeps checkout, keeps the customer relationship, and keeps the data. They’ve essentially built an intelligence layer inside themselves. Anthropic’s Claude Commerce Agents blueprint, open-sourced in September 2026, formalizes exactly this structure: shopping agents and merchant agents that sit within the merchant’s perimeter, not as a consumer-facing oracle trying to own the relationship.

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Anthropic’s New Agents: Picking the Right Side of the Counter

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Short blog. Member only post.

On September 2, Anthropic released Claude Commerce Agents, an open blueprint for building shopping agents and merchant operations agents on Claude. Linas Beliūnas has a good writeup of what actually shipped (Claude Commerce Agents: Anthropic’s Bet on Agentic Commerce). My take is simpler than his, and more opinionated.

Anthropic just made the only bet in this market that I think pays off over the next three years. They are not trying to own the consumer. They are trying to be the intelligence layer inside the merchant’s own store, app and back office. Everyone else is still fighting over the gateway.

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EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

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September 2026 – VERY VERY LONG Tech Blog on EMVCo’s new Spec

On September 1, 2026, EMVCo published a draft framework that quietly changes the architecture of agentic commerce. The “EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications” establishes a neutral, interoperable conceptual foundation for managing consumer intent across the entire payment ecosystem. After more than a year of watching proprietary platforms race to own and orchestrate “everything” in agentic, this is the most significant structural move the industry has seen.

I have written about this problem extensively, from Agentic — Intent and the New Data Games to Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability to Agentic Data Battle: Intent. The core argument has always been the same: without a structure for managing intent, there will be no trust in agentic transactions. EMVCo just read that memo.

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Instinct: Hottest Agentic Assistant – Payments Advantage?

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Short Blog.

Every few months something breaks out of the demo phase and starts showing up in my feed from people whose judgment I trust. This month it is Instinct, a personal assistant out of San Francisco that the WSJ covered on Friday (“The Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley,”). It is worth a look, not because it solves agentic commerce (it does not), but because it is the clearest example yet of where agentic actually gets traction first, and it is not where the payments industry has been looking.

The advantages of edge Use Cases and SMS…. the biggest breakthrough is happening in categories where there is no cart at all.

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Identity Success Story – itsme Belgium

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This is the fourth case study I have written on inational identity efforts. The first was India’s UIDAI, which I covered in Payments and Identity, UPI continues to lead the world. The second was Norway, in BankID Norway, Evolution and Success, last month i outlined eIDAS, Top 3 Problems. Belgium’s itsme is a fantastic collaboration of banks and mobile operators in a commercial model, it may be the cleanest available proof of my rule of thumb on identity success (see Part 1 – Identity Models, Government and Governance Structures).

Summary of today’s thesis: European digital identity is succeeding at the country level, wherever commercial entities are allowed to own the governance and the economics, and it is failing at the EU and regulatory level, where neither is defined (or mandates set). Belgium is NOT a counterexample to Europe’s identity problem. In my view, Belgium represents an example model for the answer Europe is looking for.

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ApplePay at Walmart

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Walmart announced yesterday that tap to pay arrives at select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations on August 24, with all US stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and fuel stations by mid 2027. The largest retailer in the country, and the last major holdout on contactless, is turning it on. What a great “going away” present to Jennifer Bailey!.

This is a bigger deal than the press release suggests. Walmart did not resist contactless because it disliked the technology. It resisted because contactless threatened a payment cost structure it spent twenty years building. The news here is not that Walmart added a feature. It is that Walmart concluded the feature no longer costs it anything.

For readers who want the plumbing, I laid out the EMVCo and tokenization dependencies in Understanding ApplePay in PIN Debit (May 2026). This post is the business version.

What I told Apple, repeatedly

Jennifer Bailey at Apple would always ask me the same question: “How can we get Mike [Cook] to accept ApplePay?” My answer never changed, I told her “It was not about Apple.” It was about three things:

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PayPal – Stripe/Advent: Whose Deal Is This?

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As a reminder, I’m not a financial analyst, more of a payment historian, operator and P&L exec. This is my third pass at the Stripe/Advent bid for PayPal. The first was reporting on the Reuters story. The second was opinion, built around three concerns: merchant pricing, enterprise access, and consumer engagement. Something changed since then, and it did not come from the deal. It came from Stripe.

This week Stripe confirmed its acquisition of OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, and the Collisons published a letter to investors talking about “the singularity” and the economics of AI token flow. OpenRouter has nothing to do with PayPal. That is precisely why it matters. Read the letter alongside Stripe’s annual letter from February and you get an unusually clear statement of where this company thinks its growth comes from. PayPal is not in that statement. Not adjacent to it. Not implied by it. Absent.

Thus this blog represents my internal dialog as I ask myself: whose deal is this? My answer: this is Advent’s deal. Stripe is in the room for one or two assets, and the structure of the bid is starting to show it.

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Agentic Reality: Advertising

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The hype machine behind agentic commerce is at its apex. Every week brings another protocol announcement, another pilot, another prediction that autonomous agents will soon do our shopping for us. For payment executives trying to separate signal from noise, here is the signal: the first real agentic business model is not autonomous checkout. It is advertising.

What Is Actually Working: AI Inside the Retailer

AI is making great strides within the retailer’s own domain. Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, and Michaels’ “Mike” are conversational agents built by retailers, trained on their own assortment and category expertise, driving basket sizes up over 35% in the best implementations. Amazon told investors that Rufus helped generate nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales, with monthly active users up 115% and users 60% more likely to complete a purchase (Bain & Company, “Agentic AI in Retail: How Autonomous Shopping Is Redefining the Customer Journey,” May 2026). Michaels took “Ask Mike” from concept to production in six weeks on Google Cloud, as I covered in Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”.

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eIDAS – Top 3 Problems

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Europe is twelve months away from a legal deadline for a wallet no one has asked for. Governments are required to issue digital IDs, banks are not required and will likely hold off given the success of Norway’s Bank ID model (commercial terms there). Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, commonly called eIDAS 2.0, every Member State must offer at least one certified European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet to all citizens and residents by December 2026. The Commission’s stated ambition is that 80% of European citizens use a digital identity solution by 2030.

The wallet is a container. It holds Person Identification Data (PID), the citizen’s legally recognized core identity issued under national authority. It holds Qualified Electronic Attestations of Attributes (QEAAs), which are verified claims such as a driving license, a professional qualification or a bank account identifier. It also supports Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES), which carry the legal weight of a handwritten signature in all 27 Member States. For payments, the relevant consequence is that a certified wallet credential satisfies Strong Customer Authentication, so a bank cannot arbitrarily reject a wallet based authentication event in a payment flow.

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Processors: Understanding Competitive Dynamics

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Warning – Big Blog 12 Pages

The last three weeks gave us a full sweep of processor earnings, and the results were a mixed bag (a phrase that undersells what actually happened). What we saw was not the processor sector moving together with a common tide. It was a sector splitting apart. Adyen raised guidance and jumped 16% in a day. Toast added a record number of locations and raised its full year outlook. On the “bad side of town”, we have Fiserv, which cut guidance, missed consensus, and is now down roughly 23% for the year with a brand new CEO. FIS is down about 36%. The gap between the best processors and the worst has never been this wide, and I do not think most investors have a working framework for why.

That framework is what I want to lay out here.

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