Card VAS Tailwind – Agentic

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I’ll be honest, I’ve been watching the “agentic commerce” hype train with a healthy dose of skepticism. The idea that AI agents will soon handle all our shopping feels like a solution in search of a problem. Yet, looking at the data, I have to admit something massive is happening under the surface. We are in the midst of a fundamental change in how the internet works, and while the “Agentic Era” is still 3+ years away, the tremors are already breaking the internet’s business model.

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Machine to Machine Transactions: How to Resolve Trust and Governance Gaps. 

FIDO, VC, AP2, Tokenization, Credential Issuance, Biometrics, …etc

Executive Summary

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.

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Payment Authorization – Under The Hood

Retailers should tread very carefully in direct issuer connections

My focus over the last 18 months has been identity, trust, authorization and assertions. Today I thought we would get under the hood a little on the technology of authorization and the current operational issues with a key network service: 3DS. 

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