Visa and Mastercard took a big 5%+ hit this week because a report by Citrini Research. My friend Simon Taylor lays out a summary of key points:
Continue readingResponse to Centrini and Stablecoin Impact
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Tag Archives: agentic
2025: The Great Decoupling
Year-End Payments Recap
Summary: B2B Stablecoin and The End of the Interface Era
As we close the books on 2025, the payments industry finds itself at a moment that future historians will likely designate as the end of the “Interface Era” and the dawn of the “Agentic Era.” For the past three decades, the digitization of payments has been defined by the migration of human intent from POS to digital screens. From the first e-commerce transaction to the ubiquity of mobile wallets, the fundamental atomic unit of the economy remained the same: a human being, interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI), making a conscious decision to exchange value for goods or services.
Continue readingDiscount “On Chain”. Value Exchange and Commercial Frameworks Will Define Success
Case studies in Agentic and JPM Kinexys
Key Themes
- Value exchange requires a commercial construct such as a contract, marketplace agreement or commercial network.
- Tech is enabling fragmentation both within an organization and across domains with finer-grained access to services (ex APIs), faster settlement (ex blockchain), immutable digital representations of physical world goods (ex NFT), digital trust and assertions (ex W3C Verifiable Credentials), …etc.
- While the tech is progressing at light speed, the real battle surrounds the structures, incentives and politics for how value is exchanged, and risk is assumed.
- This atomization of products, services and organizations has created new opportunities for value orchestrators. For example, what if the battle for AI and Agentic Commerce is not about LLMs efficacy, but about enabling consumers to choose the best agent and permission it from their phone (ex Apple).
- Free and Open are great tech models, but terrible business ones (ex Open Banking). Fragmented voluntary Agreements in Web3 and Agentic Commerce spaces struggle to scale due to high transaction costs associated with establishing bilateral trust.
- We are in a flux period where incumbent marketplaces and networks will dominate. For example, there is little prospect for OpenAI to disrupt Google across 7B+ Devices, 3B+ consumer accounts, GC, Advertising, Analytics, Consumer/Enterprise Services. While the buzz of “on chain” finance is loud, application of DLT in closed private blockchains is driving the majority of growth by bringing new efficiencies to established businesses (JPM Kinexys).
- While alternative “federated” and decentralized models are possible, their core challenges surround economics and governance. Who owns the end-end risk? Who manages bad actors or system flaws? Where is the commercial agreement that assigns risk?
- The next 10 yrs will NOT be a uniform movement toward one single future, but a fragmentation of how value exchange happens. For example, how identity is handled in Agentic commerce will depend on WHO owns the risk for the transaction (merchant, bank, PSP, Platform, Consumer)?
- At the consumer end, I see mobile platforms acting as the controller/orchestrator for trusted interaction across healthcare, retail, government, agentic … etc. I wouldn’t count Apple “out” of the AI race as they may assume the consumer interface role for “everything”.
- Kinexsys Case Study – Closed network, strong governance, massive scale.
Card VAS Tailwind – Agentic
© Starpoint LLP, 2025. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients).
I’ll be honest, I’ve been watching the “agentic commerce” hype train with a healthy dose of skepticism. The idea that AI agents will soon handle all our shopping feels like a solution in search of a problem. Yet, looking at the data, I have to admit something massive is happening under the surface. We are in the midst of a fundamental change in how the internet works, and while the “Agentic Era” is still 3+ years away, the tremors are already breaking the internet’s business model.
Continue readingMachine to Machine Transactions: How to Resolve Trust and Governance Gaps.
FIDO, VC, AP2, Tokenization, Credential Issuance, Biometrics, …etc
Executive Summary
The transition to agentic, machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce creates a profound governance gap that existing technology-first standards cannot fill. Today, human-in-the-loop (HIL) transactions, whether at a point-of-sale or in eCommerce, are secured not by technology alone, but by the robust, contract-based governance and risk-allocation models of networks like Visa and Mastercard. As stated previously, V/MA are the identity infrastructure for the internet and identity is the core “shaping force” for all new payment schemes.
Continue readingWalmart and Open AI
Quick Take
© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients).
This week: Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate shopping directly into ChatGPT, complete with an Instant Checkout feature. The market reacted instantly, driving WMT stock up over 5%. If you weren’t already paying attention to agentic commerce, you should be now.
For experts in payments and eCommerce, this deal is the ultimate realization of Walmart’s Everyday Low Prices (ELP) strategy. ELP is their cornerstone, and when you lead on price, you can afford to be channel agnostic. Walmart is signaling that they will be everywhere the customer is buying.
Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
The best, and perhaps only, operable protocol that can solve agent payment issues today.
Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with OpenAI, is a functional leap forward in enabling agentic commerce. While its open-source nature invites broad adoption, Stripe is uniquely able to “make it work” by leveraging its existing fraud-fighting assets. Another less reported benefit of ACP is payment rail agnostic operation. ACP will work for paybybank, PIX, EFTPOS, Swish, Bizum or anything else. Anywhere that Stipe’s device graph and Radar (Risk/Fraud) are effective. Stripe’s secure payment token plus risk signals allow merchants to operate the way they do today (no operational change).
ACP may only have a limited 2-3 yr runway as more advanced authentication methods become mainstream, and network rule sets/services advance to serve all agent providers (leveling the playing field).
Continue readingGovernance in Payments
© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also, see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog). Enterprise readers, please consider Enterprise Subscription (not required for Starpoint Clients).
Long blog – Paid Content
Executive Summary
I’ve been writing about governance, trust, transaction costs and payments for a long time. In my view THE KEY to understanding how stablecoins, agentic, DeFi, Open Banking, tokenization and other payment innovations is governance. I seem to be the only one writing about it, so I don’t see a reason to stop now. Governance is the BIGGEST competitive moat for Visa and Mastercard, and its also the heart of their biggest break out growth opportunity. If you thought AI was transformational, radically reducing transaction costs (TCE per Nobel work of Ronald Coase) will dwarf it. In fact the monetization of AI is a Gordian knot of governance issues (see Agentic Commerce and Governance).
Today I’m expanding on “value exchange” governance with 5 core themes.
Google Rolls out Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) – Techie Blog
Yesterday Google rolled out AP2. Key summary bullets
- I applaud Google’s efforts to advance AP with first focus on enabling a “Trusted Agent Economy”. AP2 (V0.1) on establishing the core architecture and enabling the most common use cases (cards, data payloads to support VC, human in the loop scenarios with step up).
- Long list of supporting participants including MA and Amex. However, no other AI platforms, nor Visa, Paze, or US Banks.
- Good detailed documentation on initial flows (see Github)
- Introduction of Verifiable Credentials (VC) as the core of AP2 with a recognition that merchants (who own risk) may also need transaction fraud data.
- A twist on the identity provider of VC to become the [Payment] Credential provider, with initial focus on cards, Google has stated goal of designing AP2 to support stablecoin, push payment and other payment types. This “sets up” Visa and Mastercard to retain their roles as the authentication infrastructure for the internet, while also allowing for other networks (India UPI) and seperate identity providers (eID) to operate with the role.
- My read is that Google has given up hope of making AP2 work in US, as Visa’s intelligent commerce framework is further along. How tokens, Issuers and networks work within AP2 is not a big technical effort, but there are several things missing from AP2, for example the rule sets (3DS, DAF, TAF, …etc) which the credential (and transaction) operates under.
- The framework is solid, authentication will be a huge part of the challenge here. Payment networks must control how authentication is performed by with their credentials. Visa and mastercard are the authentication infrastructure for the internet for a reason. Its not the technology, it is the governance, standards, enforcement and the operating rules which govern WHO OWNS THE RISK when authentication has broken. See Identity Models and Governance https://blog.starpointllp.com/?p=6470
- Of course stablecoins could work here, but guess who owns the risk when something happened that wasn’t authorized? There is no bank to complain to.. Your automated agent made a mistake and you (the consumer) have the loss.
- AP2 will be successful as the communication protocol for between agents and stakeholders, but it requires credential providers with strong governance and operating rule constructs. Visa, MA, Amex, UPI/UIDAS and PayPal all fit that bill. The challenge with this dependency is that the control points for progress are complex, as any change in a network requires buy in from existing stakeholders.
- Expect Google to demonstrate the technical efficacy of AP2 with Stablecoin or Crypto first, and then look to adapt AP2 needs to credential providers
- While the EU is the best market for Google to begin with, regulators are not keen on doing anything to help US big tech. My recommendation to Google is work on a US focus plan B that will involve US credential providers (ie Visa and Visa banks). AP2 can be the protocol, but most of it will need to operate within the authentication and rules of the credential provider.
Agentic Commerce – I’ve Seen a Lot of “Revolutions”. This One Feels Different.
Hello from Alberta and the Columbia Ice Fields. During the drive I’ve put together a Case study in how Shopify is Building a key piece of the new model. Also drill down on monetization as the Gordian Knot that will determine how Agentic Commerce Operates.
I’ve been in the payments and retail space for almost three decades. I was there for the dot-com boom and bust, the shift from plastic to mobile wallets, the birth of amazon and Google, and the rise of the platform economy. I’ve seen enough hype cycles to fill a library. Each time, we were promised a revolution that would change everything. And while some of those shifts were significant, they were ultimately evolutionary. eCommerce added a channel, mobile created more shopping interactions and more points to influence, but were mostly the same commercially.
This time, I have to admit, it feels different. The rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence aren’t just creating a new channel; they are actively dismantling the foundational economic bargain of the internet. The core paradigms I’ve operated on for my entire career is being invalidated in real-time.