I have written on agentic governance ad nauseam (Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance, Governance in Payments, Machine to Machine Transactions: How to Resolve Trust and Governance Gaps). While I’m glad to see 3 new groups jump into the effort:

• JPMorganChase. Zack Anderson, chief data and analytics officer for global banking and payments: “everybody’s building for their slice of the pie. … Our view is really that it needs to be universal” (American Banker).
• Six banks. Bank of America, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ASB, ING and NatWest published five principles: transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice and interoperability (Building Trust in Agentic Commerce).
• A new protocol. The Agentic Financial Services Protocol (AFSP) v0.1, a Know Your Agent check for banks, is open for comment through November 16.

There are 2 aspects to these standards: agentic COMMERCE and Agentic Finance (where agents perform banking functions, act on bank data and perform bank like activiteies). Lets start with agentic commerce, here I am skeptical of these standards for three for 3 reasons.

Note to subscribers. I publish a daily payments brief that is separate from my blog. Today’s brief is below as a sample. My blogs are deep. This is a laundry list across payments, identity, regulatory, advertising, agentic, AI, stablecoin… Registration is free if interested. Click on Newsletter on top nav of my site.

Long Blog – Explaining Visa, Canton, and the Architecture of Super Validators

Executive Summary

• Stablecoin Industrialization: DLT is transforming settlement and interbank networks. There is more than one approach, ranging from closed networks to open on-chain. We discuss differences between Ethereum, JPM Kinexys and Canton Network.
• Governance as a Catalyst: Governance and operational oversight have surpassed technical specifications as the primary factors driving institutional participation in distributed ledgers.
• Visa’s “Super Validator” Role: Visa expands their network governance role into Canton as a Super Validator, applying its established “network of networks” model and operational rigor to a privacy-preserving institutional infrastructure. Trust requires a commercial construct and Visa has it.
• Canton’s Privacy Architecture: Unlike public chains, Canton uses a “proof-of-stakeholder” model where transaction data is encrypted and distributed only to parties with a “need-to-know”.
• Super Validators Explained: Visa provides services to manage the “Global Synchronizer,” providing secure sequencing and atomic settlement across domains without ever decrypting sensitive transaction payloads.
• Transition from Silos: The native deployment of JPM Coin onto the Canton Network signals a definitive shift from closed “digital silos” to an interoperable, institutional-grade ecosystem.
• Solving the Interoperability Paradox: The Super Validator model addresses the “SWIFT challenge” by allowing banks to maintain private ledgers while enabling the universal connectivity required for global trade. Yes there will still be closed networks, but Canton is shaping up to be the best universal bank network.