Tag Archives: payments

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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Amazon vs Walmart: Two Very Different Bets on Agentic Commerce

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Amazon and Walmart are the two dominant forces in US retail. They are also taking fundamentally different approaches to agentic commerce — and those differences will shape how payments, checkout, and consumer trust get redesigned over the next three years. This divergence has direct implications for card networks, payment processors, authentication infrastructure, and anyone building for the future of checkout.

Amazon: Closed Stack, Agentic Inside-Out

Amazon is building agentic commerce from the inside out — embedding AI agents deep into its own proprietary infrastructure and deliberately keeping external agents at arm’s length. The strategy is control through ownership.

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PayPal – Alex is Gone, Enrique is In.. Recommended Focus

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you. As I related in June 2025 The Shakeup PayPal Needs, Dan created a dumpster fire that the BOD just added to in their AWOL engagement. 

Yesterday PayPal delivered FXN Branded growth of 1%, and announced that PayPal CEO Aex Chriss is out and HP’s CEO Enrique Lores is in (March 1st).  This event serves as the final, public admission of a decade-long strategic failure. Lores replacement of Chriss hopefully marks the end of an era of “spectator leadership” and the beginning of a desperate attempt to reintegrate a fragmented “mash” of acquisitions into a cohesive operating model. To understand the depth of the “dumpster fire” that Lores inherits, let’s look back across the last eight years, beginning with the BOD’s decision to renew Dan Schulman’s contract, a move that effectively decapitated PayPal’s operational core and set the stage for its current state of institutional irrelevance among top merchants

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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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Strategic Bets in Retail Payments

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What are the strategic drivers of change?

Where are the profit pools and how will they disperse?

A Maturing Landscape, A Shifting Playbook

Retail payments have been a cornerstone of growth and shareholder returns for decades, delivering TSRs that rivaled the tech sector. But this golden era of easy expansion is fading. Today, growth is slowing and investors are refocusing on unit economics, distinguishing between platforms with SaaS-like predictability and those more exposed to the vicissitudes of consumer credit, deposit spreads, and regulation (see Cap Gemini World Payments Report)..

This change in tone isn’t just financial, it’s structural. Value creation is migrating away from volume and into experience, infrastructure, and intelligence.

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Agentic Payments – Card Considerations

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Options for Cards in Agentic Commerce (Sorry for typos.. )

My friend Simon Taylor wrote an excellent post on the 4 Models of Agentic Payments last week. Discussion in the industry is great, and while I respect Simon’s views, we are not entirely aligned. My focus today is on the card options. 

As I discussed in Agentic Wallets and Federated Data, the models of agentic commerce are in a very high state of flux. While early leaders like OpenAI’s Operator and Perplexity demonstrate the power of what is possible, Google, Amazon and others are in a much better position to use their deep consumer insights and direct connections (from phone and search to Alexa). The initial retailer reaction to Agentic is not positive, with one saying, “We are not looking to enable another Google to disintermediate us in product search; we have our own plans to use AI to improve consumer experience”.  What is certain? AI will profoundly impact how goods are sold and how consumers interact with retailers and specialists (see Hype and Reality of Agentic Commerce). 

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Apple Opens NFC

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https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/08/developers-can-soon-offer-in-app-nfc-transactions-using-the-secure-element

Apple Opens NFC. Just off the phone with Apple. They were nice enough to treat me as a journalist and I was able to ask a few questions. 

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eCom – Politics and Scenarios

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Frank Young – Contributor

What are banks talking about this week? How did Apple’s announcement impact them? While 15bps on 2% of eCom GDV is a nuisance, 15bps on 15% of eComm GDV is an earthquake. 

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Visa Expands the Pipe

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Flexible Credentials

© 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.

Background

Visa’s network is the largest commercial network in the world, moving over $15T in volume over 4.3B cards in over 200 countries. Visa’s core is called VisaNet, a real-time messaging network between banks. They don’t move money but send instructions to and from banks, merchants, consumers and other approved third parties. The banks move the money, primarily through net settlement on ACH.  The beauty behind Visa’s network is its operating model, which allows thousands of partners to invest billions of dollars. To defeat Visa, you not only have to create a better network, but you must also create a better economic model for EVERYONE to switch, AND overcome the combined investment of all current stakeholders. This is why SEPA failed (see Power of Bank Networks). 

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