Tag Archives: mastercard

Strategic Innovation Era: Part 1 – Agentic Commerce

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The 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.

© Starpoint LLP, 2026. 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).

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Why eIDAS Will Fail in Banking

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Real World Examples

Two weeks ago I penned eIDAS – EU’s Digital Siege. If you didn’t read it, the summary is that EU’s scheme is another attempt to end run BigTech and Visa/Mastercard with a set of “keys” in a digital wallet that are separate from any bank, platform or handset. While technically brilliant, trust requires either a legal mandate, or a commercial construct (and I explain why in the blog). 

Today I’m going to provide a few layman’s examples of why eIDAS will not work in Financial Services (beyond acting as a signal). What is the problem the EU is working to solve? Unfortunately there is not single answer here, just like PSD2/PSD2/SEPA.. “Build it and they will come” (see blog on the EU’s Nobel Prize winner behind IFR – Jean Triole). If the core problem were “How do we prove something cryptographically across borders?”, eIDAS would already be a success.

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2025: The Great Decoupling

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Year-End Payments Recap

Summary: B2B Stablecoin and The End of the Interface Era

As we close the books on 2025, the payments industry finds itself at  a moment that future historians will likely designate as the end of the “Interface Era” and the dawn of the “Agentic Era.” For the past three decades, the digitization of payments has been defined by the migration of human intent from POS to digital screens. From the first e-commerce transaction to the ubiquity of mobile wallets, the fundamental atomic unit of the economy remained the same: a human being, interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI), making a conscious decision to exchange value for goods or services.

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Discount “On Chain”. Value Exchange and Commercial Frameworks Will Define Success

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Case studies in Agentic and JPM Kinexys

Key Themes

  1. Value exchange requires a commercial construct such as a contract, marketplace agreement or commercial network.

  2. Tech is enabling fragmentation both within an organization and across domains with finer-grained access to services (ex APIs), faster settlement (ex blockchain), immutable digital representations of physical world goods (ex NFT), digital trust and assertions (ex W3C Verifiable Credentials), …etc.

  3. While the tech is progressing at light speed, the real battle surrounds the structures, incentives and politics for how value is exchanged, and risk is assumed. 

  4. This atomization of products, services and organizations has created new opportunities for value orchestrators. For example, what if the battle for AI and Agentic Commerce is not about LLMs efficacy, but about enabling consumers to choose the best agent and permission it from their phone (ex Apple). 

  5. Free and Open are great tech models, but terrible business ones (ex Open Banking). Fragmented voluntary Agreements in Web3 and Agentic Commerce spaces struggle to scale due to high transaction costs associated with establishing bilateral trust.

  6. We are in a flux period where incumbent marketplaces and networks will dominate.  For example, there is little prospect for OpenAI to disrupt Google across 7B+ Devices, 3B+ consumer accounts, GC, Advertising, Analytics, Consumer/Enterprise Services. While the buzz of “on chain” finance is loud, application of DLT in closed private blockchains is driving the majority of growth by bringing new efficiencies to established businesses (JPM Kinexys). 

  7. While alternative “federated” and decentralized models are possible, their core challenges surround economics and governance. Who owns the end-end risk?  Who manages bad actors or system flaws? Where is the commercial agreement that assigns risk? 

  8. The next 10 yrs will NOT be a uniform movement toward one single future, but a fragmentation of how value exchange happens. For example, how identity is handled in Agentic commerce will depend on WHO owns the risk for the transaction (merchant, bank, PSP, Platform, Consumer)?  

  9. At the consumer end, I see mobile platforms acting as the controller/orchestrator for trusted interaction across healthcare, retail, government, agentic … etc. I wouldn’t count Apple “out” of the AI race as they may assume the consumer interface role for “everything”.

  10. Kinexsys Case Study – Closed network, strong governance, massive scale. 

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Stablecoin Scenarios

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Summary

The digital asset ecosystem has graduated from a decade of speculative experimentation to a decisive phase of infrastructure modernization. For fifteen years, the discourse surrounding blockchain technology has been dominated by the volatility of crypto-assets, effectively obscuring the underlying utility of the technology. That era has concluded. We are now witnessing the industrialization of the sector, where stablecoins have emerged not as a new form of money, but as a fundamental settlement innovation (see blog).

The GENIUS Act has provided the regulatory clarity required to transition stablecoins from the periphery of finance to its very core. This legislative milestone has catalyzed a geopolitical shockwave, prompting European finance ministers to declare U.S. stablecoins a greater threat to monetary sovereignty than trade tariffs. But while the Genius act codified “trust” in an instrument (reducing settlement risk to stablecoin issuer balance sheet), it does not address disputes and broader governance issues associated with managing participants across diverse processes and regulatory regimes.

The maturation of stablecoins is not a revolution that overthrows established banks and payments system; it is an evolution that upgrades it. The rails are being replaced while the train is moving, and those who understand the mechanics of the new tracks will determine the destination of global capital.

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Card VAS Tailwind – Agentic

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© 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. 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’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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V/MA Settlement – Tiered Acceptance

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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.

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

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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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