Updated (Huge Impact to Tether and other non-US Stablecoin Issuers)
As a payments expert who has watched the “shadow banking” sector flirt with regulatory boundaries for years, today’s draft guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on the GENIUS Act implementation is my “I told you so” (60 day comment period).
Continue readingVisa and Mastercard took a big 5%+ hit this week because a report by Citrini Research. My friend Simon Taylor lays out a summary of key points:
Continue readingIf you follow my 80+ blogs on identity, you should like this success story today. The Norwegian digital identity scheme, BankID, serves as the #2 best financial identity case study (behind India’s UIDAI) with a penetration rate of 97% across 4.7 million citizens. What could US banks learn? What are their challenges in replicating this model?
Today I’m giving the background on what BankID is.. In part 2 I’m going to interview my good friend Eric Woodward, former president of Early Warning and the creator of Zelle_ID (see youtube), at least until it was killed as the new CEO asked “what on earth does identity have to do with payments”. OMG
The FIDO Alliance is hosting a Webinar on Bank ID Norway tomorrow at 7am pacific.
Short Blog – Bullets
It’s getting harder to keep up with payments, a subsector that has not been great for payment investors, between the Saaspocalypse, AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, the Genius Act, open bank charters, and COF buying Brex, we are deep into “what just happened?” era. While I see tremendous opportunities, not everyone is impacted the same (see 2025: The Great Decoupling).
You don’t read this blog for deep tech insight; you read it to understand where change is actually happening and where the money, risk, and power are moving. Today is a short recap of which stakeholders face the biggest near-term impact, where progress is being made and where investment is flowing.
Continue readingDon’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
Exec Summary (3 pages of bullets below)
The politics and incentives around these device graphs are very complex because they define how risk is managed and controlled. Today, Merchants (and their partners) are the leaders because they own the risk (100% in the US, 50% in the EU). Today’s blog is a recap of the politics and the forces driving perfect authentication, and how this would profoundly impact the politics and the competitive positions of key payment stakeholders.
Continue readingThe 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.
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Update to my 2023 blog on CCCA Complex Politics and Consequences. I’ve spent the last few weeks digging into the latest bill and I see an overstatement of potential impact that most analysts seem to have missed:
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.
Continue reading“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
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: