Tag Archives: visa

MPP (and X402) – Solving the Internet’s “Original Sin”

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Yes another agentic payment acronym. This one is important enough to remember. Where AP2 and ACP address agents acting on behalf of humans, X402 and MPP are about agents paying agents. My friend Simon Taylor just put together one of his all-time best posts on MPP and The Intention Layer. Today’s blog is a follow-up with a bit more of a comparison, and why this is a big deal from a payment and economic perspective. My key takeaways from Simon’s post

  • The “Skinny Master Account”: Taylor suggests that humans will grant “intent” (a budget and a goal) to an agent. MPP’s Session model perfectly mirrors this: a human “locks” $50 into a session (the intention), and the agent autonomously spends it in sub-cent increments (the execution).

  • The Substrate of AI: Taylor points out that AI thrives on Structured Text (Markdown). Ironically, legacy finance (ISO 8583, NACHA files) is essentially structured text. MPP acts as the “translator” between the agent’s markdown-based intentions and the rigid requirements of the global banking system.

  • The Outcome: The winner won’t be the protocol that is “most decentralized,” but the one that most effectively manages Trust and Permissioning. Stripe and Visa, as the incumbent trust-layers of the internet, are better positioned to solve the “Agentic Spend” problem than a pure-crypto protocol.

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Stablecoins Are Not Free — Why They Are A RAIL in Consumer Payments

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There’s a narrative running through payments circles right now that goes something like this: stablecoins will replace card rails because they’re cheaper, faster, and programmable. Stripe makes acceptance easy. Card networks are too slow to innovate. Machine-Machine payments need programmability. GENIUS Act passed. The future is obvious.

I’ve been writing about stablecoins for over two years, from the case for stablecoin as a trust platform to the ECB’s monetary sovereignty alarm. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: stablecoins are not a replacement for cards, but rather another rail with cards retaining their role as the layer of abstraction for multiple networks (as they do today). They will do well where cards don’t play (micropayments, B2B and uncarded markets).

Here’s why (and why that matters more than you might think).

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Agentic Recap – Last Week’s Big Announcements. 

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Sorry for delay.. Just had a new grandson on Wednesday, and everyone is doing fine. One quick note, if your looking for one of my old posts, or topics like AP2, try my new search. Completely rebuilt to look through my posts and all “trusted” authorities on a topic.

Exec Summary

Last week’s flurry of announcements confirmed our thesis: Agentic commerce is off to a slow start, and the “machine-to-machine” (M2M) revolution is currently a “human-in-the-loop” (HIL) reality. Despite the hype, machines aren’t autonomously settling transactions yet; they are discovery engines landing consumers on retailer checkout pages. While “lab” pilots show machine to machine transactions are technically possible – in a lab. The reality is conversational commerce, more like an enhanced search. 

Key Items covered today

  1. Agentic Hurdles are huge. Changing consumer behavior, shifting risk, economic “Gordian Knot” of value creation and pricing, Trust and Authorization, …etc. The payment piece is the “easy” party.  There will be no wholesale change in the next 2-3 years, merchants and marketplaces want to retain consumer behavior and leverage their own data, the future for most transactions will be a checkout on the merchant’s website. 

  2. Card networks are firmly established as the payment method and will retain their role as the identity infrastructure of the internet. Stablecoin is a settlement  innovation, and cards can sit on top. Visa is at least 2 yrs ahead of MA. MA’s agent pay integration to Google’s AP2 mandates is still a lab experiment that will require both Issuer and merchant approval. For example Banks will want the full intent mandate to take the risk, something neither Google nor Merchants will be keen to share. 

  3. OpenAI’s abandonment of their own wallet is very significant and a realization that merchants hold the keys in the early days of eCom, with many major merchants wanting a PAR to reference COF, not a tokenized credential where they own the risk. 

  4. Visa’s two big announcements are significant. The partnership with Bridge to issue stablecoin linked cards in 100 markets will propel a new market for cards in M2M based UCs.  “INTELLIGENT AUTHORIZATION” a universal acceptance API against different schemes and payment types, thus eliminating the need for costly infrastructure rebuilds. 

  5. When perfect authentication does happen, it will be a watershed moment for payments and every entity that provides risk services. Processors will be particularly hard hit, afterall how will processors differentiate when every payment type has 0 fraud and 100% authorization rate. Shopify and other merchant service providers (MSPs will gain significant leverage and expand their own VAS). This dynamic explains why Stripe is investing so heavily in Stablecoin, its an effort to differentiate and improve speed and a developer community in something unique.

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BankID Norway – Evolution and Success

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If you follow my 80+ blogs on identity, you should like this success story today.  The Norwegian digital identity scheme, BankID, serves as the #2 best financial identity case study (behind India’s UIDAI) with a penetration rate of 97% across 4.7 million citizens. What could US banks learn? What are their challenges in replicating this model? 

Today I’m giving the background on what BankID is.. In part 2 I’m going to interview my good friend Eric Woodward, former president of Early Warning and the creator of Zelle_ID (see youtube), at least until it was killed as the new CEO asked “what on earth does identity have to do with payments”. OMG

The FIDO Alliance is hosting a Webinar on Bank ID Norway tomorrow at 7am pacific.

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Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check

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Short Blog – Bullets

It’s getting harder to keep up with payments, a subsector that has not been great for payment investors, between the Saaspocalypse, AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, the Genius Act, open bank charters, and COF buying Brex, we are deep into “what just happened?” era. While I see tremendous opportunities, not everyone is impacted the same (see 2025: The Great Decoupling).

You don’t read this blog for deep tech insight; you read it to understand where change is actually happening and where the money, risk, and power are moving. Today is a short recap of which stakeholders face the biggest near-term impact, where progress is being made and where investment is flowing.

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CCCA: 5% chance that 5% of Network EBIT could be affected (in 2+ years)

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Update to my 2023 blog on CCCA Complex Politics and Consequences. I’ve spent the last few weeks digging into the latest bill and I see an overstatement of potential impact that most analysts seem to have missed:

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Blog – AP2 Operations: Near Term – Long Term

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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).

As most of you know, AP2 is an open spec with over 160 partners. Today I’ll discuss 2 scenarios for how AP2 will integrate with card payments (with consumer Authorization). While most understand the technology behind these scenarios, the politics and strategies may provide the best insights. Identity needs a network, but network effects create stasis or equilibrium as existing participants make investments based upon current operation. Cards are the incumbent, and networks have a great plan, the biggest hurdle isn’t tech, it’s getting everyone in the boat with the right controls, governance and economics.

  1. Scenario 1 – Near Term – AP2 credentials are one of many “signals” that work with merchant owned fraud. Signals will be consumed by Merchants and MSPs as they maintain responsibility for fraud risk, and by networks/Issuers for authorization (and tokenization). 3DS has been around since 2008, I wouldn’t expect us to move at lightspeed to scenario 2 until consumers (and new fraud vectors) drive us there.

  2. Scenario 2 – Long Term – Bank issued credentials inside the device bound secure Storage (Apple Enclave, Goog Titan M2, Samsung Knox) with Issuers (thru networks operating) as the governing authority. This will involve a liability shift, a new role for mobile in managing credentials, and a new governance regime. 

  3. Scenario 3 (not covered) is walled gardens that control all standards, operations and own the risk (ex Amazon).

A nice chart covering these scenarios is in this link, courtesy of Notebook LM and Julie Fergeson.

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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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