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.
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. Continue reading
Sorry for delay.. Just had a new grandson on Wednesday, and everyone is doing fine. One quick note, if your looking for one of my old posts, or topics like AP2, try my new search. Completely rebuilt to look through my posts and all “trusted” authorities on a topic.
Last week’s flurry of announcements confirmed our thesis: Agentic commerce is off to a slow start, and the “machine-to-machine” (M2M) revolution is currently a “human-in-the-loop” (HIL) reality. Despite the hype, machines aren’t autonomously settling transactions yet; they are discovery engines landing consumers on retailer checkout pages. While “lab” pilots show machine to machine transactions are technically possible – in a lab. The reality is conversational commerce, more like an enhanced search.
Key Items covered today
Short Blog – Bullets
It’s getting harder to keep up with payments, a subsector that has not been great for payment investors, between the Saaspocalypse, AI, agentic commerce, stablecoins, the Genius Act, open bank charters, and COF buying Brex, we are deep into “what just happened?” era. While I see tremendous opportunities, not everyone is impacted the same (see 2025: The Great Decoupling).
You don’t read this blog for deep tech insight; you read it to understand where change is actually happening and where the money, risk, and power are moving. Today is a short recap of which stakeholders face the biggest near-term impact, where progress is being made and where investment is flowing.
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The x402 Foundation was publicly announced last week on September 23, 2025, as a joint initiative between Coinbase and Cloudflare. This effort aims to solve the governance issue in agentic. The design COULD SOLVE the governance issues outlined in Governance in Payments as well as last month’s Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance. As a refresh, my position is that monetization/governance is the Gordian knot preventing AI from moving to next stage of growth.
While Google’s AP2 suffers from a dependency on settlement governance and the inability to expand trust beyond their own domain (see AP2 blog), x402 is just a standard that handles payment terms negotiations between two APIs (both price and method). The foundation turns x402 into a “network) with an operational model, active governance and economics. My example is that an existing customer would have payment managed with a current card on file and the merchant owning risk, whereas a new customer (or new machine request) could agree on a non-refundable stablecoin payment.
Continue readingApplePay turns 11 yrs old this month, a wallet that has gone from 0 to 84 countries and 11,000 banks. Hard to believe, my blog was the first to break the news of ApplePay in iPhone 6 back in 2014. Back then I was on the advisory board of Money2020, and asked M2020 co-founder Johnathan Weiner to hold a place in the agenda for Apple Pay. September rolled around and we still had an “empty” slot, I told him to trust me. It worked out well, as Apple finally rolled it out on September 9th 2014. There was so much innovation in the initial wallet from tokenization, provisioning, credentials in the secure enclave, … and of course the game of chicken Apple played with Issuers on their 15bs (in US, 7bps in EU see story).
I just installed iOS 26 this morning, so what’s new in iOS 26 w/ ApplePay?
Continue readingI’m a reluctant payment historian. Over my 30 yrs I’ve seen many payment projects come and go. The latest is the European Payment Initiative’s (EPI) new wallet, Wero. Billed as Europe’s homegrown answer to Visa and Mastercard, it carries the significant political weight of figures like ECB President Christine Lagarde, who frames it as a “march to independence”. While the political ambition is clear, I believe the business case is fundamentally flawed.
Continue reading$4B market opportunity (18 mo), who will lead it?
Today’s blog covers possible pricing models and market structures for agentic transactions, a new type of demand (purchase order with a payment instrument). Retailers may despise the idea of a new aggregator, but they can’t say “no” to a PO by their customer. US retailers spend over $400B on marketing ($90B of which is digital marketing). There is no CAC for an agentic transaction.. While the daily innovations of AI and Agentic is fascinating, it is the economics and structures for pricing value that will influence participation, value creation and market success.
Continue readingFollowing up on yesterday’s discussion about the potential for US Banks to issue stablecoins, the fintech world is abuzz after Stripe’s Sessions announcements covering AI and stablecoin. Given Stripe’s massive influence, any move they make warrants attention. The question on many payment strategy executives’ minds: Is Stripe about to unleash stablecoins to circumvent traditional card rails for consumer payments? While the crypto-evangelists might be shouting “yes!”, a more pragmatic and skeptical view suggests this is highly unlikely, at least for the core retail checkout experience.
Continue readingGoogle I/O is going on today and tomorrow and they just announced a vast array of new products and services (Google CEO’s blog). Today’s blog is a quick drill down on payments and specifically what “Buy for me with GPay” means for the payment ecosystem (and agentic commerce).
As discussed in Commercial Models for AI Agents, the network and economics surrounding agentic commerce is far from settled. The lack of a clear commercial model and a robust trust framework has impeded Agentic’s growth as commerce is a multi-sided network. Google’s strategy appears to directly address these deficiencies by deeply integrating GPay as a core component of its agentic offerings. This integration aims to provide the necessary layers of trust, security, and transactional capability that have been missing. It also may provide an additional pricing mechanism for agentic transactions.
As outlined in today’s Stratechery the “lack of payments” were part of the original sin of the internet. A “sin” that Google is fixing in Agentic by creating a complex network that unites search, ML, agent-based action, payments, advertising network, billions of devices, consumer-controlled data for personalization, which will redefine eCommerce (and recapture product search). The price of entry? Merchants need to add the GPay button.
To be clear, merchants will still endeavor to use AI in order to create a better customer experience for those customers that enter their domain. But for consumers, the Google offering will be hard to beat as Google leverages their data and preferences across every device to enable customer interaction through purchase. While Amazon will likely maintain a solid position, most consumers will not start search within a merchant domain. Agentic originated transactions present a new type of demand, fully qualified consumers with a valid payment instrument and transaction request. A transaction type that should operate in a 100% conversion model (ie no abandonment). With GPay, Google provides the consumer authentication and risk data for merchants to decision the transaction.
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