June 2026
I’m at the UBS FIntech Conference and just listend to Plaid’s excellent CFO Seun Sodipo. Let me start with credit where it’s due. Plaid has done something genuinely difficult: it built a data aggregation business across thousands of banks, reached ~$546M ARR growing at 40% year-over-year, and recently hit adjusted EBITDA profitability. The IPO math is also improving, and the enterprise pivot (landing Carvana, Rocket Mortgage, H&R Block as customers) shows real commercial instinct.
While the industry recognizes that agentic commerce is reshaping payments, the more immediate technical friction lies in how it re-engineers data sharing. We are moving past the “top-of-funnel” coordination of inventory and pricing seen in protocols like UCP/MCP, entering the more contentious territory of AP2/ACP to coordinate trust and payment.
As I’ve noted in Strategic Innovation Era, we are seeing a “Retailer First” surge. Successes like Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Rufus prove that retailers are intent on controlling their own data and checkout environments.
However, external collaboration is mandatory for scale. I remain a proponent of Google’s approach: rather than a monolithic LLM, they are building a world of specialist model partnerships. But collaboration requires data exchange—the primary point of friction in this stage of strategic innovation.
Continue readingYesterday, Google’s CEO unveiled Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF. UCP represents a defining moment in the architecture of digital commerce; the strategic imperative is no longer merely about organizing the world’s information but about organizing the world’s commercial intent and empowering merchants to leverage their own data to construct superior customer experiences. This shift is not incremental; it is a fundamental re-platforming of the digital economy, where Google is uniquely positioned to serve as the orchestrator within a “virtuous cycle” of interaction among retailers, consumers, and intelligent agents.
Continue reading“For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.
At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.
As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond”. – Sundar Pichai NRF – Jan 11 2026
Yesterday PayPal announced PayPal Ads Manager
“PayPal Ads Manager gives tens of millions of small businesses access to high-margin ad revenue while creating valuable new inventory for advertisers of all sizes.”
“Retail media networks have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that generates high-margin revenue by enabling businesses to sell advertising on small business websites and apps”
As the Founder/CEO of Commerce Signals we brought card data to market primarily for measurement (now part of TU). It gave us a view of how advertisers performed and what data was valuable. I went into great detail on the challenges of JPM’s Retail Media network in my June 2025 blog Understanding How Payments Data Plays in Advertising (2025), and more generically in my 2021 blog Data Games.
Continue readingAs I stated in my Monday blog, Open Banking is dead in the US. Pay by Bank (and open banking) is effectively dead in the US. This follows JPMorgan’s move to push out its new API pricing structure to data aggregators and other third parties in the first week of July. This development comes as the “new” CFPB seeks to vacate its Section 1033 rule.
The latest is that we can expect most other major banks to roll out their own pricing within the next two weeks. These banks will have different pricing, as there was no coordination among banks. JPM has always been the most forward in protecting consumer data. A new pricing floor for data access has been established. Now that other analysts have weighed in, I can recap the pricing framework.
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I thought it was time for a payment data update. Given Paypal’s Feb 2025 investor day, JPM’s “Retail Media Network” now re-labled Media Solutions and JPM’s lawsuit against Transunion/Argus. My perspective is formed from my 8 yrs as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals. I’ll touch on signals, intent and agentic at the end.
An update to my Data Games – 2021
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Electronic receipts (eReceipts) COULD transform the retail landscape by offering numerous benefits to consumers and businesses. With the potential to enhance digital wallets, improve customer experiences, empower AI agents, and increase advertising effectiveness. However, the widespread adoption and sharing SKU-level data face several challenges, most of which are NOT technical. Today, I’m providing an overview of key business and economic challenges of unlocking SKU data.
Bull Case For Visa and Mastercard
Very Long Blog. 4 Page Exec Summary. Feedback appreciated. This blog has been my “blocker” as I’ve iterated over the last 7 months. I’ve thinned this down from 31 pages (which no one would read) to 23. No I will never write something this big again.
The thoughts below are an update to my 2016 Small Wins, where I outlined how the forces that have driven scale, and shaped organizations, are atrophying (Transaction Cost Economics, asset intensity, information intensity, finance… etc). Paul Graham’s calls this change Refragmentation, I call it Transformation of Networks.
It’s as if the gravitational constant (the big G) is changing and new forces are driving the formation of new networks influenced by a rapidly evolving world of “weak links”. Information intensity has moved beyond “tweaking” 100 yr old business models to transform the design of industries, communities and people.
Whereas the 2016 blog was more about the “possibilities” enabled by tech, this blog is about the reality of how things will evolve.
© Starpoint LLP, 2024. 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).
Side note. I have 4 blogs just about ready to go in the next week.