Tag Archives: value

Agentic Problems and Forces Creating Alignment

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In June I wrote Agentic Apocalypse: How to Stop It. That blog was about intent: agents buying the wrong thing, and platforms grading their own homework. Intent is a real problem. It is not the biggest one. The larger problem is the economic model of agentic, which I first framed in Pricing Agentic: Economic Models for a New Kind of Demand and called the Gordian Knot in Agentic Commerce: I’ve Seen a Lot of Revolutions. This One Feels Different.

Today’s blog takes eight questions in turn. The short version: agentic activity is real and growing, agents still get it wrong too often, and nobody has priced the value they create. Merchants pay for everything in commerce, payments and advertising. Any model, agent or platform ignoring this dynamic will fail. Today’s focus is identifying forces that will create alignment (and they favor the card networks).

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Tokenization and Trust

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Tokenization is taking hold. That much is settled. It is showing up in financial market clearing and settlement, payments, and in products that did not exist three years ago. What is not settled is what “tokenization” actually means.

My read: the majority of tokenization efforts are best categorized as updating existing flows between existing parties using new DLT technology. Improving flows is not the same thing as remaking a market, and the press releases rarely distinguish between the two. I recommend you parse the hype carefully as it is at or near its apex.

Regular readers will recognize the theme, and I laid out the taxonomy in 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits, and also argued in Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust enabled by Technology that the defining innovation is the trust architecture rather than the technology, and applied it most recently to SWIFT’s blockchain announcement in Parsing the Hype.

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The Power to Price

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The best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.

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Understanding Payments Data – How it Plays Today and the Near Term Future

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I thought it was time for a payment data update. Given Paypal’s Feb 2025 investor day, JPM’s “Retail Media Network” now re-labled Media Solutions and JPM’s lawsuit against Transunion/Argus. My perspective is formed from my 8 yrs as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals. I’ll touch on signals, intent and agentic at the end. 

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BNPL Travel Example – Short Blog

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Short blog today on an example BNPL opportunity and the differences between a consumer BNPL solution like Apple Pay Later and Merchant integrated solutions from providers such as Affirm (or SQ/Afterpay see Three Flavors of BNPL).  Today Air Travel and Vacation packages are the focus.

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Walmart – Banking and FinTech

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As always pardon the typos

It seems like only yesterday that 30 members of Congress wrote the acting chairman of the FDIC to stop Walmart Bank.

“Wal-Mart’s plan, to have its bank process hundreds of billions in transactions for its own stores, could threaten the stability of the nation’s payments system,”

30 Members of US Congress, March 2006

Of course, we all know that Walmart pursued a different course to deliver services. Partnerships (MGI, Moneygram, Paypal, …) and banking in a box (literally an isle with prepaid cards). Most analysts discount or “write off” Walmart’s achievements in financial services.  Given Walmart doesn’t break out financial performance of Money Center, analysts are left with the tea leaves of MGI and GDOT reports. There is little doubt that comparing Money Center financial metrics to tier 1 banks would leave most unimpressed. However, Walmart has created a portfolio of banking services that supports their overall retail strategy and creates overwhelming loyalty amongst their core customer base.  

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