Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary?

Is “Know Your Agent” (KYA) Really Necessary? The tale of an Orphan Signal

Short Blog | June 2026

A new category of startup has emerged around “Know Your Agent” (KYA) — the idea that merchants and payment platforms need a framework to verify the identity, authority, and auditability of AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. PYMNTS has covered the space extensively, and KnowYourAgent.xyz is already pitching merchants on “identity, policy controls, and evidence for every AI-agent transaction at checkout.” The framing is intuitive: if a bot is buying something, shouldn’t you know who sent it?

I want to push back — not on the problem, but on whether KYA, as a standalone service category, is the right solution.

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Part 2 – 3 Scenarios for Fintechs – Fedwire Access

Today, we are diving into Part 2 of my analysis on the implications of the Trump administration’s recent Executive Order. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here: Fedwire for Fintechs: Opportunities.. Let’s cut to the chase and look at the real-world strategy, the economics, and the top three services that I see as impacted by expanded access.

  • Zelle Killers
  • Digital Wallets
  • High Friction (disfavored) services – The 3 Ps of Payments (Pot, Porn and Poker)
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The Power to Price

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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Stripe Sessions 2026: Takeaways

It has taken two weeks, but I’m finally 20% through processing Stripe Sessions 2026 (my first). I’ll say it plainly: I was absolutely blown away by the energy, the talent, the ambition, and frankly, the sheer scale of what Stripe is building. My only real complaint? The rooms needed to be bigger. A lot bigger.

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EMVCo and DPCs

This should be a 20 page blog… but I don’t have time this week. Big picture thoughts

The April 28, 2026 announcement of Google’s donation of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to the FIDO Alliance signals Google’s desire to move payments from the legacy Device Primary Account Number (DPAN) model to the Digital Payment Credential (DPC) mandate framework. For identity and payment experts, this shift represents more than a technical update; it is an effort to commoditize the proprietary trust moats built by card networks and Apple through a standardized, platform-agnostic infrastructure.

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AP2 Donation to FIDO 

Yesterday Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance , let me share my thoughts on what this means.  

  1. Effort to drive cross-industry standardization and extend Google’s established success within the FIDO ecosystem (log in with Google) while addressing the structural limitations of FIDO.
  2. A “tipping point” transition from “Identity as a Service” to “Identity as an Infrastructure,” where the mobile handset functions as the primary root of trust for autonomous commerce. Google is telling FIDO that they must incorporate elements of W3C VCs to have a future.
  3. Google’s first big public move toward device bound credentials (Titan M2, Anroid Credential Manager, Android Ready Alliance, …etc).

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Agentic – Intent and the New “Data Games’

While the industry recognizes that agentic commerce is reshaping payments, the more immediate technical friction lies in how it re-engineers data sharing. We are moving past the “top-of-funnel” coordination of inventory and pricing seen in protocols like UCP/MCP, entering the more contentious territory of AP2/ACP to coordinate trust and payment.

The Collaboration Paradox

As I’ve noted in Strategic Innovation Era, we are seeing a “Retailer First” surge. Successes like Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Rufus prove that retailers are intent on controlling their own data and checkout environments.

However, external collaboration is mandatory for scale. I remain a proponent of Google’s approach: rather than a monolithic LLM, they are building a world of specialist model partnerships. But collaboration requires data exchange—the primary point of friction in this stage of strategic innovation.

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Owning Your Bot’s Actions: Target Part 2

In my previous post, covering Target’s “Your Bot is Your Responsibility”  was the only move they could make. When you let an AI bot loose with your credit card, you are effectively handing your car keys to a teenager; you can’t act surprised when there’s a dent in the bumper. But Target’s stance isn’t just a legal shield; it is a flare gun fired over a massive Governance Gap. Today’s agentic commerce is high on technology and standards, but dangerously low on the commercial terms that actually make markets function. To be clear, it’s not for lack of effort from V/MA, nor is it technology; it is resistance to change.

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Explaining the Death of OpenAI’s Instant Checkout

Short Blog

To my regular readers, you know the flow of data within a network is complex (see Data Games). The news that OpenAI is effectively shelving its “Instant Checkout” initiative in favor of a referral-based “conversational commerce” model shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the tech press might frame this as a strategic pivot, those of us in the eCommerce trenches know it for what it is: a collision with merchant’s role in risk, costs, CX, control and their own AI dreams.

OpenAI attempted to solve its monetization problem by trying to seize control of the top of the funnel, betting that the sheer volume of consumer demand would force merchants to bow to their interface. They were wrong. They fundamentally miscalculated the power dynamics of the transaction and the complexity of the global conversion funnel, a funnel that Google understands intimately because they serve both ends of it globally (ie merchant partners).

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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