Category Archives: Cards

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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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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EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

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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.

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ApplePay at Walmart

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Walmart announced yesterday that tap to pay arrives at select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations on August 24, with all US stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and fuel stations by mid 2027. The largest retailer in the country, and the last major holdout on contactless, is turning it on. What a great “going away” present to Jennifer Bailey!.

This is a bigger deal than the press release suggests. Walmart did not resist contactless because it disliked the technology. It resisted because contactless threatened a payment cost structure it spent twenty years building. The news here is not that Walmart added a feature. It is that Walmart concluded the feature no longer costs it anything.

For readers who want the plumbing, I laid out the EMVCo and tokenization dependencies in Understanding ApplePay in PIN Debit (May 2026). This post is the business version.

What I told Apple, repeatedly

Jennifer Bailey at Apple would always ask me the same question: “How can we get Mike [Cook] to accept ApplePay?” My answer never changed, I told her “It was not about Apple.” It was about three things:

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Processors: Understanding Competitive Dynamics

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Warning – Big Blog 12 Pages

The last three weeks gave us a full sweep of processor earnings, and the results were a mixed bag (a phrase that undersells what actually happened). What we saw was not the processor sector moving together with a common tide. It was a sector splitting apart. Adyen raised guidance and jumped 16% in a day. Toast added a record number of locations and raised its full year outlook. On the “bad side of town”, we have Fiserv, which cut guidance, missed consensus, and is now down roughly 23% for the year with a brand new CEO. FIS is down about 36%. The gap between the best processors and the worst has never been this wide, and I do not think most investors have a working framework for why.

That framework is what I want to lay out here.

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Apple – Klarna: Equipment Financing

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Last week, Apple launched Apple Upgrade, a device leasing program for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad in the United States, provided by Klarna. Apple simultaneously retired the iPhone Upgrade Program (financed by Citizens Bank) and iPhone Payments.

This is a very big deal, and it is the culmination of a strategy I first outlined over a decade ago. Equipment financing has always been the prize. Everything else Apple has done in consumer finance (Apple Card, Apple Pay Later, Apple Card Monthly Installments, the savings account) was either a stepping stone, a learning exercise, or a partner accommodation. Apple Upgrade is the main event.

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Stripe/Advent offer $53B to buy PayPal

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Sometimes the biggest signal is not the price, it is who is showing up with the money. This morning, Reuters reported that Stripe and Advent International have jointly offered to acquire PayPal for more than $53 billion. Stripe, the largest privately held payments company on the planet, has walked into the room and said, in effect, we would like to own the incumbent. That framing alone reorganizes how you should read the last five years of PayPal’s decline and the next five years of network competition.

I have been writing about PayPal’s structural problems for a long time. Most recently in PayPal, Alex is Gone, Enrique is In. Recommended Focus, where I argued that Enrique Lores was inheriting a “dumpster fire” of acquisitions and shifting consumer focus, and that the only path forward was decisive surgery on the operating model. A $53B “take private” from Stripe and Advent is one very specific answer to that question. Today’s blog is a quick overview of the Reuters report together with my own read, and questions any investor should be asking before they get out over their skis on this.

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Hypothetical Scenario — Using Star as Entry Point for Zelle at POS

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Summary. This is my best case scenario for a STAR acqusition and as a banker I still wouldn’t do it. PIN networks are archaic. I would externalize Zelle for POS and sell it to merchants based on value (ex instant funds availabiltiy, liability shift at POS and eCom). For the tech, I would subcontract the service to Visa while I own the network.  Don’t bother reading this blog unless you are a payment geek that wants to think about the macro options on a “new debit network”. Remember, even if the top 3 banks moved to a new debit network, it would only be a 2% revenue hit to Visa. This is almost noise.

Background

I’ve spent this week writing about what a top‑4 bank consortium buying Fiserv’s Star network would and wouldn’t accomplish. On Monday I laid out five business and political reasons the deal is unlikely to happen. Tuesday’s blog explained how ApplePay/PIN-debit works within a technical deep-dive. This blog outlined why owning Star doesn’t buy the tokenization and provisioning path that Visa still controls. Yesterday’s retailer and industry feedback captured what I heard from the merchant and processor side stakeholders. One of the stakeholder ideas surfaced with a new idea worth sitting with: what if you didn’t buy Star to run PIN debit at Durbin-exempt rates — but instead as the on-ramp for accepting Zelle at the POS?

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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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