Category Archives: Agentic Commerce

Programmable Money – Coins and Cards

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Overview

Today we discuss programmable money, a concept that merges smart contract functionality with digital tokens operating on distributed ledger technology (DLT). We trace the historical development from open decentralized finance (DeFi) to the adoption of permissioned systems by leading financial institutions, analyze the technical distinctions between public and private blockchains, and emphasize the necessity of robust governance for scalable deployment. The paper further examines real-world use cases in high-value asset transactions and the growing relevance of programmable money in agentic commerce, highlighting the role of stablecoins and card networks in enabling trusted, logic-driven payments.

There is a payment geek battle of concepts in Agentic commerce. Conceptually, stablecoins and smart contracts provide a better technical architecture for agentic. However, it is my firm belief that these new technologies will be used by existing networks and stakeholders rather than a completely new set of participants and approaches. For example, Visa and Mastercard are likely to remain both the primary off ramp for Stablecoin (ie card merchant acceptance) AND ALSO retain their role in standards, governance, identity, economics and how programmability operates with regulated stakeholders.

I know many of my colleagues will disagree with my views here, that is OK as the dialog will help us all. As such, your comments are welcome.

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Strategic Bets in Retail Payments

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What are the strategic drivers of change?

Where are the profit pools and how will they disperse?

A Maturing Landscape, A Shifting Playbook

Retail payments have been a cornerstone of growth and shareholder returns for decades, delivering TSRs that rivaled the tech sector. But this golden era of easy expansion is fading. Today, growth is slowing and investors are refocusing on unit economics, distinguishing between platforms with SaaS-like predictability and those more exposed to the vicissitudes of consumer credit, deposit spreads, and regulation (see Cap Gemini World Payments Report)..

This change in tone isn’t just financial, it’s structural. Value creation is migrating away from volume and into experience, infrastructure, and intelligence.

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Visa Product Drop – Enabling Agentic 

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Today Visa provided products, partnerships and demonstrations of “Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy”. This is a very significant effort from Visa that extends their leadership as the payment and identity infrastructure of the internet, to new era of AI and Agentic Commerce. 

What is the new problems it is solving? Payments geeks understand Card Present (CP) and Card Not Present (CNP) transactions, but agents raise the question of WHO authorized the agent and for what purpose?  Visa solves this problem by extending existing facilities like tokenization and FIDO based authentication, with agents receiving finer-grained authorization (from consumer) using limited-use tokens that restrict authorization and consumer control (expiration/time, amount and merchant).   

Within an agentic transaction flow, authentication by the Agent operator is not good enough for the merchant that will bear the risk in the transaction, the merchant must also be able to authenticate the consumer and obtain authorization for the transaction (see Tokens and Binding 101 and Separating Payments and Identity).

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Commercial Models for AI Agents

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Short Blog.. but core to a new series that will attempt to address this strategic question

I find it hard to believe that anyone could keep up with the daily technical updates in AI, the pace of innovation is truly astounding. Given the completion of my recent agentic commerce survey, I thought I’d provide a few of my thoughts on the uncertainties surrounding the economics associated with AI agentic architectures.  While the technology is fascinating, the market operation of AI and Agents is nascent. How is value measured? How will it be monetized?  Who has the pricing power?  How will this impact existing markets, systems and participants? My perspective here is based upon my experience in networked businesses, but even more so in measurement (as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals).

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Understanding Merchants – Cards on FIle

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Why merchants prefer cards they control. Implications for Agentic, Pay By Bank and beyond… 

Short Blog. My last blogs on the topic were Acceptance Hurdles (2022) and the more technical list of 14 core processing activities in Acceptance Part 1 (2016). 

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Agentic Payments – Card Considerations

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Options for Cards in Agentic Commerce (Sorry for typos.. )

My friend Simon Taylor wrote an excellent post on the 4 Models of Agentic Payments last week. Discussion in the industry is great, and while I respect Simon’s views, we are not entirely aligned. My focus today is on the card options. 

As I discussed in Agentic Wallets and Federated Data, the models of agentic commerce are in a very high state of flux. While early leaders like OpenAI’s Operator and Perplexity demonstrate the power of what is possible, Google, Amazon and others are in a much better position to use their deep consumer insights and direct connections (from phone and search to Alexa). The initial retailer reaction to Agentic is not positive, with one saying, “We are not looking to enable another Google to disintermediate us in product search; we have our own plans to use AI to improve consumer experience”.  What is certain? AI will profoundly impact how goods are sold and how consumers interact with retailers and specialists (see Hype and Reality of Agentic Commerce). 

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eReciepts – The Politics and Economics of SKU Data

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An update to my Data Games – 2021

© 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.

Electronic receipts (eReceipts) COULD transform the retail landscape by offering numerous benefits to consumers and businesses. With the potential to enhance digital wallets, improve customer experiences, empower AI agents, and increase advertising effectiveness. However, the widespread adoption and sharing SKU-level data face several challenges, most of which are NOT technical. Today, I’m providing an overview of key business and economic challenges of unlocking SKU data.

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Scenario – Agentic Wallets and Federated Data

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Keeping up with the latest in agentic commerce, artificial intelligence (AI), payments, and data privacy is an ongoing challenge. Data and LLM are the key ingredients fueling the rapid advancements in AI and machine learning innovations. As a privacy advocate, I remain deeply concerned about the centralization of data. Once AI models are built to understand “you,” they no longer need continuous access to your data—just ongoing observation (see blogs on Data Centralization and Payments and the Observer Effect).

Do I think wallets will become “Agents”? No, but they will be the most important interface to all Agents, as they broker identity, authentication, authorization, permissions and highly secure data in the handset. My view is that Wallets enable many agents. This view of the the world is called the Agentic Mesh where specialized agents work together to achieve a result.

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