Tag Archives: google

Agentic Recap – Last Week’s Big Announcements. 

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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.

Exec Summary

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

  1. Agentic Hurdles are huge. Changing consumer behavior, shifting risk, economic “Gordian Knot” of value creation and pricing, Trust and Authorization, …etc. The payment piece is the “easy” party.  There will be no wholesale change in the next 2-3 years, merchants and marketplaces want to retain consumer behavior and leverage their own data, the future for most transactions will be a checkout on the merchant’s website. 

  2. Card networks are firmly established as the payment method and will retain their role as the identity infrastructure of the internet. Stablecoin is a settlement  innovation, and cards can sit on top. Visa is at least 2 yrs ahead of MA. MA’s agent pay integration to Google’s AP2 mandates is still a lab experiment that will require both Issuer and merchant approval. For example Banks will want the full intent mandate to take the risk, something neither Google nor Merchants will be keen to share. 

  3. OpenAI’s abandonment of their own wallet is very significant and a realization that merchants hold the keys in the early days of eCom, with many major merchants wanting a PAR to reference COF, not a tokenized credential where they own the risk. 

  4. Visa’s two big announcements are significant. The partnership with Bridge to issue stablecoin linked cards in 100 markets will propel a new market for cards in M2M based UCs.  “INTELLIGENT AUTHORIZATION” a universal acceptance API against different schemes and payment types, thus eliminating the need for costly infrastructure rebuilds. 

  5. When perfect authentication does happen, it will be a watershed moment for payments and every entity that provides risk services. Processors will be particularly hard hit, afterall how will processors differentiate when every payment type has 0 fraud and 100% authorization rate. Shopify and other merchant service providers (MSPs will gain significant leverage and expand their own VAS). This dynamic explains why Stripe is investing so heavily in Stablecoin, its an effort to differentiate and improve speed and a developer community in something unique.

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BankID Norway – Evolution and Success

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If you follow my 80+ blogs on identity, you should like this success story today.  The Norwegian digital identity scheme, BankID, serves as the #2 best financial identity case study (behind India’s UIDAI) with a penetration rate of 97% across 4.7 million citizens. What could US banks learn? What are their challenges in replicating this model? 

Today I’m giving the background on what BankID is.. In part 2 I’m going to interview my good friend Eric Woodward, former president of Early Warning and the creator of Zelle_ID (see youtube), at least until it was killed as the new CEO asked “what on earth does identity have to do with payments”. OMG

The FIDO Alliance is hosting a Webinar on Bank ID Norway tomorrow at 7am pacific.

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Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check

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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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Strategic Innovation Era: Part 1 – Agentic Commerce

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The opposite of Web3, the biggest companies are investing in AI and DLT to redesign the value chain. This one is long.. 12 pages. This is not a repackaging of prior blogs, today I break down how I see Banks, Retailers and Google collaboratively investing to make agentic work. It won’t be a hockey stick, but it will fundementally redesign the value chain. An extinction-level event for those who don’t invest. My main focus is on Google’s unique capability to manage MANY AGENTS and how that orchestration happens from an economic perspective. My predicted winners: Google, First-Mover Retailers like Walmart, Card Networks, and new intermediaries that can build specialized agents.

© Starpoint LLP, 2026. 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).

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UCP Enables a New Economy

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Yesterday, Google’s CEO unveiled Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF.  UCP represents a defining moment in the architecture of digital commerce; the strategic imperative is no longer merely about organizing the world’s information but about organizing the world’s commercial intent and empowering merchants to leverage their own data to construct superior customer experiences.  This shift is not incremental; it is a fundamental re-platforming of the digital economy, where Google is uniquely positioned to serve as the orchestrator within a “virtuous cycle” of interaction among retailers, consumers, and intelligent agents. 

“For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.

At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.

As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond”. – Sundar Pichai NRF – Jan 11 2026

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AP2 as Merchant Signals – 4 Scenarios 

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Today I’m outlining three near-term scenarios (24 months) for how AP2 signals will work in agentic commerce. Per my blog last week, AP2 is the agentic payment scheme with the most momentum (160+ partners), but in the immediate term (2026–2027), it will operate primarily in a “signals” metaphor for 3 main reasons:

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Blog – AP2 Operations: Near Term – Long Term

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© 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).

As most of you know, AP2 is an open spec with over 160 partners. Today I’ll discuss 2 scenarios for how AP2 will integrate with card payments (with consumer Authorization). While most understand the technology behind these scenarios, the politics and strategies may provide the best insights. Identity needs a network, but network effects create stasis or equilibrium as existing participants make investments based upon current operation. Cards are the incumbent, and networks have a great plan, the biggest hurdle isn’t tech, it’s getting everyone in the boat with the right controls, governance and economics.

  1. Scenario 1 – Near Term – AP2 credentials are one of many “signals” that work with merchant owned fraud. Signals will be consumed by Merchants and MSPs as they maintain responsibility for fraud risk, and by networks/Issuers for authorization (and tokenization). 3DS has been around since 2008, I wouldn’t expect us to move at lightspeed to scenario 2 until consumers (and new fraud vectors) drive us there.

  2. Scenario 2 – Long Term – Bank issued credentials inside the device bound secure Storage (Apple Enclave, Goog Titan M2, Samsung Knox) with Issuers (thru networks operating) as the governing authority. This will involve a liability shift, a new role for mobile in managing credentials, and a new governance regime. 

  3. Scenario 3 (not covered) is walled gardens that control all standards, operations and own the risk (ex Amazon).

A nice chart covering these scenarios is in this link, courtesy of Notebook LM and Julie Fergeson.

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Why eIDAS Will Fail in Banking

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Real World Examples

Two weeks ago I penned eIDAS – EU’s Digital Siege. If you didn’t read it, the summary is that EU’s scheme is another attempt to end run BigTech and Visa/Mastercard with a set of “keys” in a digital wallet that are separate from any bank, platform or handset. While technically brilliant, trust requires either a legal mandate, or a commercial construct (and I explain why in the blog). 

Today I’m going to provide a few layman’s examples of why eIDAS will not work in Financial Services (beyond acting as a signal). What is the problem the EU is working to solve? Unfortunately there is not single answer here, just like PSD2/PSD2/SEPA.. “Build it and they will come” (see blog on the EU’s Nobel Prize winner behind IFR – Jean Triole). If the core problem were “How do we prove something cryptographically across borders?”, eIDAS would already be a success.

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2025: The Great Decoupling

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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.

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