Category Archives: Networks/Schemes

Posts covering payment networks and schemes

PIX Update

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My last blog on PIX was 2022, so it is time for an update. When Brazil’s Central Bank (BCB) launched PIX in November 2020, the stated goal was simple: kill cash. Four years later, mission accomplished and then some. PIX has evolved from a peer-to-peer transfer tool into something far more consequential: a domestic debit scheme that challenges the card networks (debit).

The June 2026 launch of Pix Automático marks the inflection point. Brazil now has a government-mandated recurring payment rail that bypasses Visa and Mastercard entirely for subscriptions and utility billing. The BCB’s own PIX Statistics dashboard shows the trajectory:

  • 79.7 billion transactions in 2025—a 26% year-over-year increase
  • BRL 35.3 trillion (~$6.3 trillion USD) in value moved
  • 93% of Brazilian adults now use PIX
  • For the first time, Person-to-Business (P2B) transactions surpassed P2P, now representing over 44% of total volume
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ZelleUSD — A Private Coin

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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.

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Agentic Data Battle: Intent

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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.

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Can Processors Win a Role in Agentic?

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Adyen’s stock is down over 40% this year. Investors aren’t just punishing one company; they’re repricing the entire processor category as agentic commerce threatens to restructure who controls economics and merchant relationships. The market sees what I’ve been writing about for 18 months: processors are at risk of becoming dumb pipes.

Yesterday, Adyen announced Adyen Agentic a suite of modular APIs encompassing Agentic Feed (product/inventory), Agentic Cart (checkout orchestration), and Agentic Payments (authentication, fraud, tokenization). The positioning is explicit: a “universal translator” that lets merchants integrate once and participate across every agent platform, protocol, and payment method.

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Stablecoin Strategy – Visa and Mastercard Are Taking Very Different Roads

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The two dominant card networks are both committed to stablecoins. Both see digital assets as a meaningful component of their long-term growth story. Both have articulated clear strategies to their investors. But the roads they are taking could not be more different and the implications for how value-added services grow, who captures the upside, and how fast innovation moves are significant.

Mastercard is buying the infrastructure. Visa is building a network and enabling shared investment.

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JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain

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Builds on: 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits | Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | Stablecoin Scenarios

The WSJ reported yesterday that JPMorgan, Citigroup, and TCH (a consortium of the largest US banks) are planning a shared tokenized deposit system. For anyone who has been following this space, this is not a surprise. It is a confirmation. I’ve been writing about this trajectory for years. The question was never whether banks would adopt blockchain infrastructure. The question was always how and the commercial construct that governs operation. Now we know. 

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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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DPCs Great Idea with a Long Way To Go

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Executive Summary

I’m fortunate to chat with a diversity of large payment network stakeholders. As most of you know, I view the challenge in payments more from a political/incentive viewpoint than a technical one. The alphabet soup of new standards is hard to keep up with, but be assured that each one has a proponent (who benefits) and a group of resistors. Innovation in a network is hard, as existing stakeholders have built assets and competitive positions based upon how things work today. Today’s blog covers DPCs. DPCs may not be the biggest threat, but they are the newest. I’m not going to attempt a deep tech dive into DPCs; my effort is focused more on the challenges faced by any new payment innovation to gain traction and scale. Network effects are hard to beat!

Why read this blog? My readers know I view identity and authentication as part of the core “bundle” of payments, and Visa/MA are the de facto identity infrastructure of the internet because they unlock the power of banks (ie KYC) within a commercial framework with active governance. Today we are breaking down the latest “threat”: Digital Payment Credentials (DPCs) within Agentic(ie Gemini, GPay). The quick summary is that DPCs are an amazing technical innovation without a commercial framework or active governance, and thus will be challenged to operate separately from established networks (just like Stablecoins). This 23 page monster blog is a breakdown of the politics and the tech.

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Wero 2026: Sovereignty at a Commercial Premium

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Just left a UBS webinar from the head of product for Wero and thought it would be a good time to update my July 2025 assessment of Wero as a “solution in search of a problem,”. The biggest change in Wero is the core infrastructure has transitioned from a voluntary service to a mandated utility. However, as the European Payments Initiative (EPI) attempts to scale, the project faces a fundamental conflict between political objectives and commercial unit economics.

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V/MA Settlement – Tiered Acceptance

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Quick Take on WSJ – V/MA Near Deal w/ Merchants

Merchants have long expressed frustration over card costs, but it’s critical to separate signal from noise. Their issue isn’t with network fees—those average just 5 to 7 basis points and fund the global infrastructure that securely moves trillions. The real pressure point is interchange, often 250 basis points or more for premium rewards cards. That imbalance has shaped years of litigation, and now a potential reset is emerging.

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