Big News – Google I/O 2025 – Payments View

Google I/O is going on today and tomorrow and they just announced a vast array of new products and services (Google CEO’s blog). Today’s blog is a quick drill down on payments and specifically what “Buy for me with GPay” means for the payment ecosystem (and agentic commerce).

As discussed in Commercial Models for AI Agents, the network and economics surrounding agentic commerce is far from settled. The lack of a clear commercial model and a robust trust framework has impeded Agentic’s growth as commerce is a multi-sided network. Google’s strategy appears to directly address these deficiencies by deeply integrating GPay as a core component of its agentic offerings. This integration aims to provide the necessary layers of trust, security, and transactional capability that have been missing. It also may provide an additional pricing mechanism for agentic transactions.

As outlined in today’s Stratechery the “lack of payments” were part of the original sin of the internet. A “sin” that Google is fixing in Agentic by creating a complex network that unites search, ML, agent-based action, payments, advertising network, billions of devices, consumer-controlled data for personalization, which will redefine eCommerce (and recapture product search). The price of entry? Merchants need to add the GPay button.

To be clear, merchants will still endeavor to use AI in order to create a better customer experience for those customers that enter their domain. But for consumers, the Google offering will be hard to beat as Google leverages their data and preferences across every device to enable customer interaction through purchase.  While Amazon will likely maintain a solid position, most consumers will not start search within a merchant domain. Agentic originated transactions present a new type of demand, fully qualified consumers with a valid payment instrument and transaction request. A transaction type that should operate in a 100% conversion model (ie no abandonment). With GPay, Google provides the consumer authentication and risk data for merchants to decision the transaction.

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Programmable Money – Coins and Cards

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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Stablecoins: Near-Term Predictions

12 Page Blog

Key Themes

  • Stablecoin growth is booming in the areas of remittance, cross-border, disbursement, and B2B supply chain. 
  • Card volumes face no threat as they remain the “last mile” of use and an economic model for stable coin issuers. 
  • The STABLE and GENIUS acts are driving significant central bank discussions, with divergent views on response in Europe. 
  • Asia is developing differently, with the effectiveness of Ukraine sanctions and fear of dollarization driving central banks to a CBDC approach.
  • The value of any network corresponds to the combined investment made by all parties around it. Stablecoin is the fastest-growing network and at the core of most FinTech investments.
  • PayPal, and legacy remittance providers are under a substantial near term threat
  • Expect big tech and mobile platforms to support stablecoins in new ways (ex recurring payments and emerging markets). 
  • A small number of low profit Banking segments are also at risk, as Stablecoin issuers become banks and threaten niche payment providers like Cash App, as well as specialists in categories like MSB, NBFCs, ELMI, …etc.

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Strategic Bets in Retail Payments

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 

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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Stablecoins. Breaking down a momentous set of April announcements

Impact of Stablecoins on Banks and Central Banks, the Upside for V/MA.

Stablecoins took many amazing leaps in the last 2 weeks. Key developments include

  1. PayPal’s new Stablecoin (PYUSD) earning 3.7% (in PYPL wallet). 
  2. Circle Launches Cross-Border Payment Network:- Circle Payments Network (CPN) – see CPN whitepaper
  3. Paxos and Coinbase, as well as Circle, are pursuing bank charters
  4. Visa to join Paxos and Robinhood in USDG
  5. EU banks are creating a new consortium around stablecoin with the involvement of ING and others.
  6. ECB flags risk of contagion from US crypto push in new policy paper, similarly the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) also published a paper outlining how Crypto and DeFi may destablize finance. 
  7. Italy’s finance minister warns that the attractiveness of US stablecoins poses a bigger risk to Europe than Tariffs.
  8. Regulatory – The STABLE Act has advanced through the House Financial Services Committee, increasing the likelihood of Congress passing legislation to regulate stablecoins (and New Bank Formation Act). Fed Chairman Powell voiced strong support at the Economic Club of Chicago.
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Capital One’s Acquisition of Discover – Set to Reinvent Retail Banking?

An Update on the Future of Retail Banking – April 2025 By Thomas Noyes

With the conditional approval from the OCC on April 17, 2025, Capital One’s (COF) acquisition of Discover Financial Services (DFS) marks one of the most transformative events in U.S. retail banking in over a decade. While prior large-bank deals often focused on scale, this one signals a strategic reinvention. Capital One, long admired for its technical prowess, is poised to blur the traditional boundaries between credit, savings, and checking—challenging the conventional “retail bank” construct. This merger represents not just an expansion of balance sheet or customers, but a redefinition of what banking can look like in the age of AI, embedded finance, and consumer control.

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eCommerce Acquiring – Beyond Tokens – The Next Big Wave of Improvement

Short Blog

© 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.

Adyen was the largest network “tokenizer” and realized the benefits through enhanced authorization rates and reduced fraud. As I explained in Tokens and Binding 101, this history of tokens in payments is long, with each stakeholder maintaining an ability to tokenize. While all token strategies protect data, network tokens differ in RULES, binding (to a customer and device) and acceptance. For example, Visa’s Cloud Token Framework (CTF) and Mastercard’s Digital Enablement Services (MDES) address 6 key areas:

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Visa Investor Day – The 7 Reasons Why I Invest in Visa

Short Blog

Visa held their Investor Day last week on Feb 20, and I encourage everyone to read through the presentations. Most of you know my strong network bias, V/MA are my top personal holdings. I’m not a financial analyst; my investment hypothesis rests on the strategic need for card networks and their sustainable advantage in meeting those needs. 

Let me provide my top 7 reasons why I am so firmly behind the networks, with references to investor day content and my previous blogs.

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