Author Archives: InsidePmts

How Will Stripe Treasury and Balance Impact SMB Banks?

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I am a loyal Bank of America customer (personal and business); I have absolutely no interest in changing banks given their 20+ year history of consistent service. I’m also a Stripe customer (blog payments) and am fantastically satisfied with their payment processing. Yesterday I received this email from Stripe.

I’m now enabled for Stripe Treasury. With a single button click I can now move money in real time anywhere in the world for $0 cost and earn 1% on my balance. 

This is an amazing value proposition. My 15 seconds of effort to turn this on led me to think about the impact of Treasury and Balance on SMB banks. Feedback appreciated.

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Shopify Reduces Stripe Dependency

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This week Shopify released its Fall ’26 Edition content. The payments news is that Shop Pay now works inside personal agents (Muse, Claude Duet, Grok Bot and Instinct), and it works for brands that are not on Shopify. I found a great tech overview of the payment portion in Shopify Takes Shop Pay Into AI Agents and Off Platform Checkouts (The Defiant, Oct 29, 2026).

I am positive on Shopify as the best agentic enabler for merchants. ShopPay is also the best converting consumer wallet in eCommerce. Edition outlines how ShopPay competes directly with Stripe Link, at the moment Stripe is seeking to expand its consumer role within agent permissioning (see last week’s blog Stripe Link Balance). Stripe and Shopify have been partners for more than a decade. Payments is now a core area of friction.

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Stripe Link Balance

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This week Stripe launched Link balance for AI agents, starting with Instinct (Announced on X by Stripe). Stripe balance is the “agent control dashboard” where Consumers add money, set a per purchase limit, and their agent can buy without asking for approval every time. Read it. On the surface it is a wallet feature. Underneath it is Stripe building a consumer business, because right now Stripe is the only company that can make agentic payments work.

I think this is brilliant, but Issuing banks, merchants, MSPs and other agentic Platforms should take note of Stripe’s very big expansion into consumer direct interaction

What Stripe Launched

The stack has four parts

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Walmart Agent Gateway

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This month Walmart announced Agent Profiles, the Walmart Agent Gateway and a set of terms for AI agents (Walmart, “Making It Possible for Agents to Shop on Behalf of Customers,” Oct 2026). Walmart is supporting customers the way they want to shop: through the agents they choose, with the customer’s controls and Walmart’s rules. In March I described Amazon vs Walmart: Two Very Different Bets on Agentic Commerce. This is Walmart’s bet made concrete, and IMHO it is the most important retail move in agentic commerce this year.

Walmart just became the retail partner of choice for every third party agent, and it kept the payment, the risk, the customer experience and the support.

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Banks are Blocking Agents – Why?

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On JPMorgan’s third quarter earnings call this week, Jamie Dimon said the bank will block outside AI agents from logging in to customer accounts (Fortune, Oct 15, 2026):

“We’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come inside the company, because that’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan. You don’t want rogue agents.” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Q3 2026 earnings call

Citi and Bank of America have since put similar restrictions in place (Yahoo Finance). My friend Simon Taylor covers the story from the innovation and enablement side in Fintech Brainfood, and he makes good points. I write this one from the bank side. Jamie Dimon is spot on here. In a big way.

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Why Banks Are Best Positioned in Intent: Amex Updates ACE to Provide the Model

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Wednesday, American Express published its Intent Intelligence framework, a new core service of the Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit. I covered the ACE launch in April in American Express Breaks the Agentic Commerce Deadlock: Why Today Matters. In April, Amex said it would stand behind agent errors. This week it published how it will know what the agent was supposed to do.

I have written five posts on the problem of intent in machine to machine (M2M) transactions:

One principle runs through all of them: intent data must flow to the party taking the risk. Amex has now published a framework built around the issuer, the party that authorizes the payment, answers the phone and absorbs the dispute (and COULD take on liability).

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Trust, Data, AI and Specialized Agents

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Trust and Governance could turn AI into a powerful force for decentralization, community, and value creation.

This is a big picture blog: my hypothesis on the forces shaping how AI and commerce will evolve. It builds on two posts I return to often. The New Economy: Small Wins (2016) argued for an economy where millions of small businesses thrive. Part 3: Internet 2.5, The Next Wave is Here (2022) argued that trust is the core of networks and commerce, how it changes is the key shaping force in the “next wave”. AI is now testing both ideas at once.

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Agentic Governance. “Standards” are worthless without a Commercial Construct

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I have written on agentic governance ad nauseam (Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance, Governance in Payments, Machine to Machine Transactions: How to Resolve Trust and Governance Gaps). While I’m glad to see 3 new groups jump into the effort:

  • JPMorganChase. Zack Anderson, chief data and analytics officer for global banking and payments: “everybody’s building for their slice of the pie. … Our view is really that it needs to be universal” (American Banker).
  • Six banks. Bank of America, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ASB, ING and NatWest published five principles: transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice and interoperability (Building Trust in Agentic Commerce).
  • A new protocol. The Agentic Financial Services Protocol (AFSP) v0.1, a Know Your Agent check for banks, is open for comment through November 16.

There are 2 aspects to these standards: agentic COMMERCE and Agentic Finance (where agents perform banking functions, act on bank data and perform bank like activiteies). Lets start with agentic commerce, here I am skeptical of these standards for three for 3 reasons.

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Retail, Roles and Know Your Agent

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We all accept that agents are a new entity in consumer commerce. We get how technology (AI, MCP and aggregation) can work together to find the best product at the best price. The question for payments is different. What will agents change in payment and risk?

In June I asked Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary? and called KYA an orphan signal. Since then the topic has moved into standards work, but only in part. EMVCo’s draft agentic framework “recognizes the emerging need for Know Your Agent capabilities” (EMVCo, “Agentic Payments: Framework for Specifications 1.0,” Draft, Aug 2026). The tools that exist define how an agent identifies itself and acts on behalf of a consumer: AP2 and Verifiable Intent carry the consumer’s credential, the delegated intent (open mandate) and the specific action (closed mandate). KYA itself is far from settled. At the Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) conference in Geneva in September, EMVCo listed Know Your Agent as future work, alongside Intent Services and use cases (EMVCo and FIDO Alliance, “Trusted Agentic Payments,” GDC 2026, Sep 3, 2026). My view has not changed.either banks (In bank owned risk), or merchants (in merchant owned risk) will control what and how the consumer permissioned. The trust in the agent is at a rules level, not a KYC like level.

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Meta’s Muse: The Agent Becomes the Control Point

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Three weeks ago I argued that Meta would stay upstream as a preference and affinity layer and leave checkout to retailers. Half of that held. Meta is not taking checkout from retailers. But Muse is more than a preference layer. It is an attempt to build a new orchestration point, one that sits between the consumer, the merchant, the wallet, and the payment network.

The shift I am watching is from wallet-centric commerce, where the merchant owns the interaction and presents payment choices, to agent-centric commerce, where the agent orchestrates merchant, wallet, credential, and transaction. If that shift happens at scale, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, banks, and wallets become services the agent can use. Meta owns the consumer relationship and the purchase intent, which is worth more.

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