PayPal – Alex is Gone, Enrique is In.. Recommended Focus

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you. As I related in June 2025 The Shakeup PayPal Needs, Dan created a dumpster fire that the BOD just added to in their AWOL engagement. 

Yesterday PayPal delivered FXN Branded growth of 1%, and announced that PayPal CEO Aex Chriss is out and HP’s CEO Enrique Lores is in (March 1st).  This event serves as the final, public admission of a decade-long strategic failure. Lores replacement of Chriss hopefully marks the end of an era of “spectator leadership” and the beginning of a desperate attempt to reintegrate a fragmented “mash” of acquisitions into a cohesive operating model. To understand the depth of the “dumpster fire” that Lores inherits, let’s look back across the last eight years, beginning with the BOD’s decision to renew Dan Schulman’s contract, a move that effectively decapitated PayPal’s operational core and set the stage for its current state of institutional irrelevance among top merchants

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Strategic Innovation Era: Part 1 – Agentic Commerce

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The opposite of Web3, the biggest companies are investing in AI and DLT to redesign the value chain. This one is long.. 12 pages. This is not a repackaging of prior blogs, today I break down how I see Banks, Retailers and Google collaboratively investing to make agentic work. It won’t be a hockey stick, but it will fundementally redesign the value chain. An extinction-level event for those who don’t invest. My main focus is on Google’s unique capability to manage MANY AGENTS and how that orchestration happens from an economic perspective. My predicted winners: Google, First-Mover Retailers like Walmart, Card Networks, and new intermediaries that can build specialized agents.

© Starpoint LLP, 2026. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients).

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UCP Enables a New Economy

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Yesterday, Google’s CEO unveiled Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF.  UCP represents a defining moment in the architecture of digital commerce; the strategic imperative is no longer merely about organizing the world’s information but about organizing the world’s commercial intent and empowering merchants to leverage their own data to construct superior customer experiences.  This shift is not incremental; it is a fundamental re-platforming of the digital economy, where Google is uniquely positioned to serve as the orchestrator within a “virtuous cycle” of interaction among retailers, consumers, and intelligent agents. 

“For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.

At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.

As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond”. – Sundar Pichai NRF – Jan 11 2026

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AP2 as Merchant Signals – 4 Scenarios 

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Today I’m outlining three near-term scenarios (24 months) for how AP2 signals will work in agentic commerce. Per my blog last week, AP2 is the agentic payment scheme with the most momentum (160+ partners), but in the immediate term (2026–2027), it will operate primarily in a “signals” metaphor for 3 main reasons:

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Blog – AP2 Operations: Near Term – Long Term

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© Starpoint LLP, 2025. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer(this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients).

As most of you know, AP2 is an open spec with over 160 partners. Today I’ll discuss 2 scenarios for how AP2 will integrate with card payments (with consumer Authorization). While most understand the technology behind these scenarios, the politics and strategies may provide the best insights. Identity needs a network, but network effects create stasis or equilibrium as existing participants make investments based upon current operation. Cards are the incumbent, and networks have a great plan, the biggest hurdle isn’t tech, it’s getting everyone in the boat with the right controls, governance and economics.

  1. Scenario 1 – Near Term – AP2 credentials are one of many “signals” that work with merchant owned fraud. Signals will be consumed by Merchants and MSPs as they maintain responsibility for fraud risk, and by networks/Issuers for authorization (and tokenization). 3DS has been around since 2008, I wouldn’t expect us to move at lightspeed to scenario 2 until consumers (and new fraud vectors) drive us there.

  2. Scenario 2 – Long Term – Bank issued credentials inside the device bound secure Storage (Apple Enclave, Goog Titan M2, Samsung Knox) with Issuers (thru networks operating) as the governing authority. This will involve a liability shift, a new role for mobile in managing credentials, and a new governance regime. 

  3. Scenario 3 (not covered) is walled gardens that control all standards, operations and own the risk (ex Amazon).

A nice chart covering these scenarios is in this link, courtesy of Notebook LM and Julie Fergeson.

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Why eIDAS Will Fail in Banking

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Real World Examples

Two weeks ago I penned eIDAS – EU’s Digital Siege. If you didn’t read it, the summary is that EU’s scheme is another attempt to end run BigTech and Visa/Mastercard with a set of “keys” in a digital wallet that are separate from any bank, platform or handset. While technically brilliant, trust requires either a legal mandate, or a commercial construct (and I explain why in the blog). 

Today I’m going to provide a few layman’s examples of why eIDAS will not work in Financial Services (beyond acting as a signal). What is the problem the EU is working to solve? Unfortunately there is not single answer here, just like PSD2/PSD2/SEPA.. “Build it and they will come” (see blog on the EU’s Nobel Prize winner behind IFR – Jean Triole). If the core problem were “How do we prove something cryptographically across borders?”, eIDAS would already be a success.

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2025: The Great Decoupling

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Year-End Payments Recap

Summary: B2B Stablecoin and The End of the Interface Era

As we close the books on 2025, the payments industry finds itself at  a moment that future historians will likely designate as the end of the “Interface Era” and the dawn of the “Agentic Era.” For the past three decades, the digitization of payments has been defined by the migration of human intent from POS to digital screens. From the first e-commerce transaction to the ubiquity of mobile wallets, the fundamental atomic unit of the economy remained the same: a human being, interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI), making a conscious decision to exchange value for goods or services.

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Europe’s Siege – Digital Sovereignty Strategy

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Summary

EU’s  payment and identity landscape is currently the theater of a high-stakes conflict between regulatory ambition and commercial reality. For the past decade, European legislators have pursued a strategy of “regulatory innovation,” attempting to break the dominance of US-based technology platforms (Apple, Google) and payment networks (Visa, Mastercard) through legislative mandates. From the failed efforts of 2015 IFR (regulating excess profits), PSD2, PSD3 and eIDAS 2.0, the pattern is consistent: enforce technical openness in the hope that competitive markets will spontaneously emerge.

This strategy is fundamentally flawed because it conflates technical connectivity with commercial viability. While the EU has successfully legislated open APIs and is now forcing open the phone SE architecture, it has consistently failed to address the “commercial constructs” (governance, liability, and economic incentives) that make these systems work. Without a radical shift acknowledging the necessity of commercial constructs over regulation, the EU’s initiatives will result in compliant but commercially irrelevant infrastructure, that no one will monetize (or invest in), further relegating the EU to a second tier market and leaving US platforms to dominate.

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