Tag Archives: trust

Updates from Money 2020

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It 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.

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Agentic’s Real Economic Opportunity: Edge Use Cases

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This blog is a monster 25 pages. Hence the executive summary

Transformation seldom starts at the core of an existing market or business, but rather starts in edge use cases of unmet needs and price performance (ie, Innovators Dilemma). Edge UCs may be the biggest economic opportunity for Agentic, organizing hyperlocal, DTC and the food chain to create a new kind of market. If these edge UCs can be addressed in the US, it also greatly expands the global market opportunity as small regional needs resemble the edge.

The consumer benefit of this approach is an awareness of the very different “purpose” of agentic platforms vs Amazon or Walmart.  Imagine identifying which businesses and service providers could address your needs locally. 

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Wallets and Privacy

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I’m on a brief vacation celebrating my 28th anniversary and deep in thought (pic below). What am I thinking of here on the beach? Wallets, Networks, Trust and Privacy.

The Case for Separating Wallets from Identity Providers

As digital identities continue to evolve, one of the most important debates centers around who controls and operates the wallet that holds these identities. Specifically, should wallets be separated from authorities that legally issue “identity”—commonly known as Identity Providers (IdPs)? This issue is particularly relevant in countries like India and Europe, where digital identity initiatives have made significant strides, yet their approaches raise important questions about privacy and control.

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Winning in Network of Networks: Collaboration

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My largest holdings are card networks, and I’m very keen on their continued growth and sustainability of competitive advantage. My confidence is based on five broad themes. 

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Wallets, APIs and Trust

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6 Page Blog

Top of mind today are Wallets, Identity and Application Program Interfaces (APIs). APIs are the core concept behind many new business models investors must decipher:

  • Software as a Service (SaaS)
  • Payments as a Service (PaaS)
  • Banking as a Service (PaaS)
  • Open Banking – PISP, AISP, ..etc
  • Account Aggregation – FDX, Plaid, Akoya, … etc
  • Payment Service Provider (PSP) – Stripe, Adyen, PYPL/Braintree, … etc

Previously, I’ve covered this topic in Open Banking and Open Payments and Trust Networks (2020)  Part 3 – Internet 2.5 (2022), Modularity and Trust (2022) and Evolution of V/MA – Moving Beyond Cards (2021). Summary points from these previous blogs:

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Identity, Authentication and Risk

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Bridging Domains – Short Blog – Random Thoughts

This is a “Random Thoughts” blog, which means there are many points that I’ve left hanging (not finished cleanly). The blog’s objective is to stimulate discussion, so please don’t hesitate to comment.  Identity is a hot topic for me with 15+ years of previous bosts. Here are a few updates … as well as my evolving perspective. 

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Part 3 – Internet 2.5 – The Next “Wave” is Here

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Happy After Thanksgiving! Hope everyone was able to enjoy a wonderful time with family and friends. Today is the 3rd installment of the series, a long blog. 
The next big network wave is here. Call it web 2.5 or 3.0, but the integration of payments into “everything” is a major event. Payments are the “trust layer” that TRANSFORM anonymous nodes providing uncertain service into known, defined and guaranteed service providers. Effective communities require value exchange and “trust”. The payment trust function enables networks to evolve from “cost free” discovery and information sharing, into transactional resource/service exchange: from read-write to read-write-execute. Sure we could call the wave “trust” but the only ubiquitous “trust network” is payments so I prefer to keep payment wave as the naming convention.

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Random Thoughts – Modularity and Trust

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Trust in a transaction. In another one of my favorite books  (Design Rules: modularity) there exists the concept of trust between physical components of an integrated system. This book stands in contrast to Nobel Economists’ work in defining the “Firm” and organizational boundaries in Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). But the technical theory of modularity is amazingly consistent with the concepts of “boundaries” in TCE. In modularity, there are 4 core rules for separating technical components:

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