Apple announced a suite of new Wallet and Apple Pay features this week at WWDC 2026. None of them will make the front page of TechCrunch. But taken together, they reflect something far more interesting: a payments team that has been quietly executing “the best” wallet vision for over a decade, among the most disciplined groups in consumer payments.
The two dominant card networks are both committed to stablecoins. Both see digital assets as a meaningful component of their long-term growth story. Both have articulated clear strategies to their investors. But the roads they are taking could not be more different and the implications for how value-added services grow, who captures the upside, and how fast innovation moves are significant.
Mastercard is buying the infrastructure. Visa is building a network and enabling shared investment. Continue reading
Builds on: 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits | Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | Stablecoin Scenarios
The WSJ reported yesterday that JPMorgan, Citigroup, and TCH (a consortium of the largest US banks) are planning a shared tokenized deposit system. For anyone who has been following this space, this is not a surprise. It is a confirmation. I’ve been writing about this trajectory for years. The question was never whether banks would adopt blockchain infrastructure. The question was always how and the commercial construct that governs operation. Now we know.
June 2026
I’m at the UBS FIntech Conference and just listend to Plaid’s excellent CFO Seun Sodipo. Let me start with credit where it’s due. Plaid has done something genuinely difficult: it built a data aggregation business across thousands of banks, reached ~$546M ARR growing at 40% year-over-year, and recently hit adjusted EBITDA profitability. The IPO math is also improving, and the enterprise pivot (landing Carvana, Rocket Mortgage, H&R Block as customers) shows real commercial instinct.
Is “Know Your Agent” (KYA) Really Necessary? The tale of an Orphan Signal
Short Blog | June 2026
A new category of startup has emerged around “Know Your Agent” (KYA) — the idea that merchants and payment platforms need a framework to verify the identity, authority, and auditability of AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. PYMNTS has covered the space extensively, and KnowYourAgent.xyz is already pitching merchants on “identity, policy controls, and evidence for every AI-agent transaction at checkout.” The framing is intuitive: if a bot is buying something, shouldn’t you know who sent it?
I want to push back — not on the problem, but on whether KYA, as a standalone service category, is the right solution.
Note to subscribers. I publish a daily payments brief that is separate from my blog. Today’s brief is below as a sample. My blogs are deep. This is a laundry list across payments, identity, regulatory, advertising, agentic, AI, stablecoin… Registration is free if interested. Click on Newsletter on top nav of my site.
Continue readingI just got back from 2 weeks of vacation and catching up on all that transpired. No one reads this blog for its technical depth, but a few browse it for the economic implications and power struggles going on behind the scenes (hence “inside baseball”).
I/O 2026 was last week (see product announcements). The Commerce team showed how Universal Cart, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) would drive a frictionless revolution in digital commerce. By consolidating products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single persistent cart, Google is attempting to establish itself as the default transaction and orchestration layer of the internet. While consumers would love to engage across any platform and any retailer from any device…. A universal cart is also necessary for operating across any agentic platform and “specialist”. Agentic commerce is certainly gaining traction, but Walmart’s Rufas and Amazon’s Alexa also want to play in the game at the front end (so does Open AI)
Wallet expansion to universal cart is great for Google; however, it’s not great for everyone else, as platforms make for poor custodians (i.e., they are not neutral). Particularly when it comes to controlling credentials and measuring their own effectiveness. My concerns here are shared by retailers, banks, processors and networks as this architecture conceals a profound structural conflict over control and economic value. Google’s “own-it-all” will create a great customer experience, and allow them to move agentic from the current “conversational commerce to merchant checkout” state, but who wants to invest in a platform where they become disintermediated, or a dumb fulfillment pipe?
I want to break down what the May 19, 2026 Executive Order on financial technology actually means for our industry. If you are looking for a basic textbook explanation of Fedwire or the National Settlement Service (NSS), you will not find it here. See my blog Settlement – Core of Banking for how the plumbing works. Today, I’m on what this EO means for Fintechs, with a discussion on the operational constraints likely to occur.
The day after the President signed the executive order, the Federal Reserve Board dropped a formal proposal to establish a special-purpose “Payment Account”. This is a streamlined, payments-only account category designed to bypass the traditional Master Account bottleneck. Under the new framework, the Fed is promising a 90-day review timeline for Tier 2 and Tier 3 non-bank applicants.
This sounds like a massive win, but as we look at the fine print, the operational reality is a lot more complicated. Here is my breakdown of the core opportunities, the constraints, and the economic hurdles you need to consider.
Continue readingThe best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.
Continue readingIt has taken two weeks, but I’m finally 20% through processing Stripe Sessions 2026 (my first). I’ll say it plainly: I was absolutely blown away by the energy, the talent, the ambition, and frankly, the sheer scale of what Stripe is building. My only real complaint? The rooms needed to be bigger. A lot bigger.
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