Category Archives: Identity

Trust, Data, AI and Specialized Agents

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Continue reading →

EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

Posted on by
1

September 2026 – VERY VERY LONG Tech Blog on EMVCo’s new Spec

On September 1, 2026, EMVCo published a draft framework that quietly changes the architecture of agentic commerce. The “EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications” establishes a neutral, interoperable conceptual foundation for managing consumer intent across the entire payment ecosystem. After more than a year of watching proprietary platforms race to own and orchestrate “everything” in agentic, this is the most significant structural move the industry has seen.

I have written about this problem extensively, from Agentic — Intent and the New Data Games to Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability to Agentic Data Battle: Intent. The core argument has always been the same: without a structure for managing intent, there will be no trust in agentic transactions. EMVCo just read that memo.

Continue reading →

Instinct: Hottest Agentic Assistant – Payments Advantage?

Posted on by
Reply

Short Blog.

Every few months something breaks out of the demo phase and starts showing up in my feed from people whose judgment I trust. This month it is Instinct, a personal assistant out of San Francisco that the WSJ covered on Friday (“The Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley,”). It is worth a look, not because it solves agentic commerce (it does not), but because it is the clearest example yet of where agentic actually gets traction first, and it is not where the payments industry has been looking.

The advantages of edge Use Cases and SMS…. the biggest breakthrough is happening in categories where there is no cart at all.

Continue reading →

Identity Success Story – itsme Belgium

Posted on by
Reply

This is the fourth case study I have written on inational identity efforts. The first was India’s UIDAI, which I covered in Payments and Identity, UPI continues to lead the world. The second was Norway, in BankID Norway, Evolution and Success, last month i outlined eIDAS, Top 3 Problems. Belgium’s itsme is a fantastic collaboration of banks and mobile operators in a commercial model, it may be the cleanest available proof of my rule of thumb on identity success (see Part 1 – Identity Models, Government and Governance Structures).

Summary of today’s thesis: European digital identity is succeeding at the country level, wherever commercial entities are allowed to own the governance and the economics, and it is failing at the EU and regulatory level, where neither is defined (or mandates set). Belgium is NOT a counterexample to Europe’s identity problem. In my view, Belgium represents an example model for the answer Europe is looking for.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us

eIDAS – Top 3 Problems

Posted on by
Reply

Europe is twelve months away from a legal deadline for a wallet no one has asked for. Governments are required to issue digital IDs, banks are not required and will likely hold off given the success of Norway’s Bank ID model (commercial terms there). Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, commonly called eIDAS 2.0, every Member State must offer at least one certified European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet to all citizens and residents by December 2026. The Commission’s stated ambition is that 80% of European citizens use a digital identity solution by 2030.

The wallet is a container. It holds Person Identification Data (PID), the citizen’s legally recognized core identity issued under national authority. It holds Qualified Electronic Attestations of Attributes (QEAAs), which are verified claims such as a driving license, a professional qualification or a bank account identifier. It also supports Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES), which carry the legal weight of a handwritten signature in all 27 Member States. For payments, the relevant consequence is that a certified wallet credential satisfies Strong Customer Authentication, so a bank cannot arbitrarily reject a wallet based authentication event in a payment flow.

Continue reading →

Understanding eIDAS Impact on Banking and Payments

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Continue reading →

ZelleUSD — A Private Coin

Posted on by
1

Builds on: Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain | Open Banking, Open Payments and Trust Networks

Early Warning announced this week that Zelle is going international, starting with India — the world’s largest remittance destination. Alongside this, they unveiled ZelleUSD (ZLUSD), which they’re calling a “proprietary U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin.” Cue the analyst notes about banks “finally getting into stablecoin.”

I’m already laughing… this is Banks BEATING Stableocin and Remittance Providers at their own game with a closed network. This Is Not a competitor to USDC, and you can’t buy it on Coinbase, so Don’t Get Confused.

Continue reading →

Agentic Data Battle: Intent

Posted on by
Reply

Paid Content

Key Friction Point in Agent (M2M) Transactions. Example of why real agentic transactions are 2-3 yrs away. We have a new party in a transaction that everyone needs to trust: the agent. Mastercard/Google Verifiable Intent is a LONG WAY from satisfying the need. It’s a self-attestation (see the Technical Addendum at the end of the Blog).

My prior blogs have focused extensively on the trust challenge in agentic commerce: authenticating the consumer and the agent (the actor). As I discussed in EMVCo and DPCs, financial institutions must verify and authenticate the four pillars of a transaction: the User, the Instrument, the Actor (Agent), and the Action (Payment). Today, I want to dive deeper into the fourth pillar—the Action—and the emerging battle over intent data.

A New Party to the Transaction

For decades, payment transactions have involved a familiar cast: the consumer, the merchant, the issuer, and the network. Each party has well-defined roles, risk allocation, and data flows governed by established rule sets. Agentic commerce introduces a new party: the Agent.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us

WWDC 2026: Apple Wallet

Posted on by
Reply
Apple announced a suite of new Wallet and Apple Pay features this week at WWDC 2026. None of them will make the front page of TechCrunch. But taken together, they reflect something far more interesting: a payments team that has been quietly executing “the best” wallet vision for over a decade, among the most disciplined groups in consumer payments. Continue reading →

AP2 Donation to FIDO 

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance , let me share my thoughts on what this means.  

  1. Effort to drive cross-industry standardization and extend Google’s established success within the FIDO ecosystem (log in with Google) while addressing the structural limitations of FIDO.

  2. A “tipping point” transition from “Identity as a Service” to “Identity as an Infrastructure,” where the mobile handset functions as the primary root of trust for autonomous commerce. Google is telling FIDO that they must incorporate elements of W3C VCs to have a future.

  3. Google’s first big public move toward device bound credentials (Titan M2, Anroid Credential Manager, Android Ready Alliance, …etc).

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us