Author Archives: InsidePmts

FISV: Star Sale? Retailer and Industry Feedback

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Short update on my industry discussions yesterday (in very brief form). 

Retailers

  • Convinced US Banks would attempt to follow COF/Discover model and that Banks were not concerned about the politics. 
  • Emphasize banks want control, with most seeing that BAC/WFC would make sense as owners of STAR
  • Agreed that retailers would react to price increases, but only top 20 retailers have payment teams with enough depth to act on a plan (ex turn off Star).
  • Believed acceptance rate and processor incentives would be a key hurdle, but that if pricing was around 125bps there was room to create superior processor incentives. 
  • Loss of Tap to Pay and eCommerce (ie no PIN Debit) were consensus consumer impacts with no clear workaround. 
  • Agree that retailers would strongly lobby OCC and CPFB that this was an obvious effort to end run Durbin. May seek to block acquisition. 
  • Discover is an EMVCO member with most tools that would allow conversion of Pulse to dual message. No path for STAR (or EMVCo membership)
  • Bank Consortium could use this as a path toward Zelle acceptance at POS (for 125 bps). This was probably the biggest “new” insight I gained

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Understanding ApplePay in PIN Debit

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Payment Geek detail on the EMVCO Dependencies of Debit and How Cap One Solved It

This is a technical addendum to today’s post on the reported JPMorgan/BofA/Wells/PNC exploration of buying Fiserv’s Star network. That post laid out five business and political reasons the deal is unlikely to happen. This one goes underneath the business case to the technical architecture that makes the wallet portion (ie ApplePay, GPay, SamsungPay) of the problem particularly ugly for any bank that thinks owning a PIN debit network gets them out from under Durbin.

The short version: an issuer that buys Star cannot simply route its ApplePay volume through Star. The tokenization and provisioning plumbing that makes Apple Pay work belongs to Visa and Mastercard, sits inside a standards body (EMVCo) that issuers are not members of, and is architecturally structured around the card brand on the card (not the issuer that issued it). A bank that owns Star still can’t put a Star token in Apple Pay; it is a new AID in the phone.

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Are US Banks Really Considering a Durbin End Run with FISV’s Star?

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(Paid Subscriber Research)

Yesterday’s WSJ story that JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC have held “preliminary and tentative” talks to buy Fiserv’s Star debit network is being read as the opening shot in a big-bank campaign to escape Durbin. My first reaction: this is a bit of old news. Fiserv and its private equity suitors have been shopping Star as a spin-off for the better part of four years. Every time the pitch surfaces, the same five objections surface with it. Nothing about the current version of the deal has removed those objections; if anything, the political climate has made them harder.

Before I get to why I don’t believe it will happen, a quick refresher on the business logic, because that logic is real, and it explains why Fiserv can keep the pitch alive.

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Challenger Banks: What the Sell-Side is Telling Us

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July 2026 — Tom Noyes

Eight months ago I wrote The Neobank Revolution? Not how I see it… after sitting through FinTech NerdCon and listening to the Nubank co-founder and Chime present. My verdict was skeptical: growth is not profitability, the US addressable market is structurally unattractive, and the liabilities of every neobank combined barely register on JPMorgan’s balance sheet.

I was right about some of it. I was wrong about enough of it that this update is warranted and this time I want to ground the analysis in what sell-side analytsts are publishing, not just my own read.

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Open USD – Stablecoin’s New Gold Standard for Trust, Compliance, Governance and Economics

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July 1, 2026

Executive Summary

  • 140+ institutions — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, Coinbase, and major global banks form the largest stablecoin consortium ever assembled

  • Shares reserve economics — Partners receive yield from underlying reserves, not the issuer; flips the Circle/Tether model

  • Zero-fee minting at scale — No volume limits, no enterprise penalties

  • Pre-transaction compliance — Transfer hooks block sanctioned transactions before settlement, not after

  • Burn and clawback authority — Architectural ability to freeze/burn for OFAC compliance built into Token-2022 implementation

  • Confidential transfers with regulatory visibility — ZK-encrypted balances for corporate privacy; viewing keys for auditors

  • Neutral governance — Independent board of ecosystem partners; no single corporate controller

  • Stripe default — “The default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe”

Yesterday, we witnessed the launch of what may become the most consequential stablecoin ever: Open USD (OUSD). With over 140 financial, technology, and crypto institutions signing on—from Visa and Mastercard to Stripe, BlackRock, and Google. This isn’t merely another stablecoin entering a crowded market. This is the emergence of a new trust network architecture that I’ve been writing about for years.

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Agentic Apocalypse — How to Stop It

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Company Spotlight: Delta Network

June 30, 2026

In my recent posts on Agentic Data Battle: Intent and Agentic – Intent and the New Data Games, I’ve emphasized that the trust challenge in agentic commerce goes far beyond authenticating the consumer and the agent. We must verify the action itself (the fourth pillar of any transaction). But no one is willing to budge. Platforms don’t want to give out intent to banks or networks (even with explicity consumer consent), they don’t want to be measured. While networks are the right neutral party, network VAS means loss of control. Today’s blog outlines the hard data on agent intent failure (28%) and best in class example of how to fix it.

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Understanding eIDAS Impact on Banking and Payments

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What is eIDAS?

eIDAS stands for Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services. It is European Union law — originally enacted in 2014 (eIDAS 1.0) and substantially revised in 2024 (eIDAS 2.0, formally Regulation 2024/1183) — that creates a legal framework for digital identity across all 27 EU member states.

The core ambition is straightforward: a citizen in Portugal should be able to use their national digital identity credential to authenticate with a German bank, a French hospital, or a Dutch government portal — and that credential should carry legal standing equivalent to a physical ID card.

eIDAS 2.0 goes further. It mandates that every EU member state must offer at least one European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet — a mobile application in which citizens store and selectively disclose certified attributes: their national eID, driving license, professional qualifications, and eventually bank account credentials or KYC attestations.

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Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability 

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Executive Summary

I just got back from 2 weeks of vacation and catching up on all that transpired. No one reads this blog for its technical depth, but a few browse it for the economic implications and power struggles going on behind the scenes (hence “inside baseball”).

I/O 2026 was last week (see product announcements). The Commerce team showed how Universal Cart, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) would drive a frictionless revolution in digital commerce.  By consolidating products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single persistent cart, Google is attempting to establish itself as the default transaction and orchestration layer of the internet. While consumers would love to engage across any platform and any retailer from any device…. A universal cart is also necessary for operating across any agentic platform and “specialist”.  Agentic commerce is certainly gaining traction, but Walmart’s Rufas and Amazon’s Alexa also want to play in the game at the front end (so does Open AI)

Wallet expansion to universal cart is great for Google; however, it’s not great for everyone else, as platforms make for poor custodians (i.e., they are not neutral). Particularly when it comes to controlling credentials and measuring their own effectiveness.  My concerns here are shared by retailers, banks, processors and networks as this architecture conceals a profound structural conflict over control and economic value.  Google’s “own-it-all” will create a great customer experience, and allow them to move agentic from the current “conversational commerce to merchant checkout” state, but who wants to invest in a platform where they become disintermediated, or a dumb fulfillment pipe? 

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Fedwire for Fintechs – Opportunities

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I want to break down what the May 19, 2026 Executive Order on financial technology actually means for our industry. If you are looking for a basic textbook explanation of Fedwire or the National Settlement Service (NSS), you will not find it here. See my blog Settlement – Core of Banking for how the plumbing works. Today, I’m on what this EO means for Fintechs, with a discussion on the operational constraints likely to occur.

The day after the President signed the executive order, the Federal Reserve Board dropped a formal proposal to establish a special-purpose “Payment Account”. This is a streamlined, payments-only account category designed to bypass the traditional Master Account bottleneck. Under the new framework, the Fed is promising a 90-day review timeline for Tier 2 and Tier 3 non-bank applicants. 

This sounds like a massive win, but as we look at the fine print, the operational reality is a lot more complicated. Here is my breakdown of the core opportunities, the constraints, and the economic hurdles you need to consider.

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The Power to Price

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The best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.

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