Quick Take on WSJ – V/MA Near Deal w/ Merchants
Merchants have long expressed frustration over card costs, but it’s critical to separate signal from noise. Their issue isn’t with network fees—those average just 5 to 7 basis points and fund the global infrastructure that securely moves trillions. The real pressure point is interchange, often 250 basis points or more for premium rewards cards. That imbalance has shaped years of litigation, and now a potential reset is emerging.
FIDO, VC, AP2, Tokenization, Credential Issuance, Biometrics, …etc
The transition to agentic, machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce creates a profound governance gap that existing technology-first standards cannot fill. Today, human-in-the-loop (HIL) transactions, whether at a point-of-sale or in eCommerce, are secured not by technology alone, but by the robust, contract-based governance and risk-allocation models of networks like Visa and Mastercard. As stated previously, V/MA are the identity infrastructure for the internet and identity is the core “shaping force” for all new payment schemes.
Continue readingIt was truly fantastic catching up with so many of you in person at Money 2020! It’s clear that payments, AI, and digital assets are accelerating at an unbelievable pace. If you didn’t manage to make it, or if you were too busy grabbing coffee to focus on the news flow, here are my top takeaways from the floor. I hope to see some of you in Miami at Simon’s Fintech Nerdcon!
The core theme I kept hearing is that the future of commerce is moving rapidly toward machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions. As this happens, the role of V/MA networks (governance, economics, trust, identity, and authorization) becomes even more crucial. The technology is the easy part; the governance is the real competitive moat.
Continue readingQuick Take
© Starpoint LLP, 2024. 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).
This week: Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate shopping directly into ChatGPT, complete with an Instant Checkout feature. The market reacted instantly, driving WMT stock up over 5%. If you weren’t already paying attention to agentic commerce, you should be now.
For experts in payments and eCommerce, this deal is the ultimate realization of Walmart’s Everyday Low Prices (ELP) strategy. ELP is their cornerstone, and when you lead on price, you can afford to be channel agnostic. Walmart is signaling that they will be everywhere the customer is buying.
Yesterday PayPal announced PayPal Ads Manager
“PayPal Ads Manager gives tens of millions of small businesses access to high-margin ad revenue while creating valuable new inventory for advertisers of all sizes.”
“Retail media networks have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that generates high-margin revenue by enabling businesses to sell advertising on small business websites and apps”
As the Founder/CEO of Commerce Signals we brought card data to market primarily for measurement (now part of TU). It gave us a view of how advertisers performed and what data was valuable. I went into great detail on the challenges of JPM’s Retail Media network in my June 2025 blog Understanding How Payments Data Plays in Advertising (2025), and more generically in my 2021 blog Data Games.
Continue readingStripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with OpenAI, is a functional leap forward in enabling agentic commerce. While its open-source nature invites broad adoption, Stripe is uniquely able to “make it work” by leveraging its existing fraud-fighting assets. Another less reported benefit of ACP is payment rail agnostic operation. ACP will work for paybybank, PIX, EFTPOS, Swish, Bizum or anything else. Anywhere that Stipe’s device graph and Radar (Risk/Fraud) are effective. Stripe’s secure payment token plus risk signals allow merchants to operate the way they do today (no operational change).
ACP may only have a limited 2-3 yr runway as more advanced authentication methods become mainstream, and network rule sets/services advance to serve all agent providers (leveling the playing field).
Continue readingShort Blog
The x402 Foundation was publicly announced last week on September 23, 2025, as a joint initiative between Coinbase and Cloudflare. This effort aims to solve the governance issue in agentic. The design COULD SOLVE the governance issues outlined in Governance in Payments as well as last month’s Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance. As a refresh, my position is that monetization/governance is the Gordian knot preventing AI from moving to next stage of growth.
While Google’s AP2 suffers from a dependency on settlement governance and the inability to expand trust beyond their own domain (see AP2 blog), x402 is just a standard that handles payment terms negotiations between two APIs (both price and method). The foundation turns x402 into a “network) with an operational model, active governance and economics. My example is that an existing customer would have payment managed with a current card on file and the merchant owning risk, whereas a new customer (or new machine request) could agree on a non-refundable stablecoin payment.
Continue reading© Starpoint LLP, 2024. 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).
I’ve been writing about governance, trust, transaction costs and payments for a long time. In my view THE KEY to understanding how stablecoins, agentic, DeFi, Open Banking, tokenization and other payment innovations is governance. I seem to be the only one writing about it, so I don’t see a reason to stop now. Governance is the BIGGEST competitive moat for Visa and Mastercard, and its also the heart of their biggest break out growth opportunity. If you thought AI was transformational, radically reducing transaction costs (TCE per Nobel work of Ronald Coase) will dwarf it. In fact the monetization of AI is a Gordian knot of governance issues (see Agentic Commerce and Governance).
Today I’m expanding on “value exchange” governance with 5 core themes.
ApplePay turns 11 yrs old this month, a wallet that has gone from 0 to 84 countries and 11,000 banks. Hard to believe, my blog was the first to break the news of ApplePay in iPhone 6 back in 2014. Back then I was on the advisory board of Money2020, and asked M2020 co-founder Johnathan Weiner to hold a place in the agenda for Apple Pay. September rolled around and we still had an “empty” slot, I told him to trust me. It worked out well, as Apple finally rolled it out on September 9th 2014. There was so much innovation in the initial wallet from tokenization, provisioning, credentials in the secure enclave, … and of course the game of chicken Apple played with Issuers on their 15bs (in US, 7bps in EU see story).
I just installed iOS 26 this morning, so what’s new in iOS 26 w/ ApplePay?
Continue readingYesterday Google rolled out AP2. Key summary bullets