Snippings

Dwayne Gefferie calls this “one step past” ageentic commerce to the point where the machines are no longer stops shopping for people but buying for themselves, the world of machine-to-machine payments and, as he points out, in the first half of this year, we saw Coinbase, Stripe, Google, Visa, Mastercard and AWS all shipping agent-to-agent payment products. Software can discover a service, agree a price and pay in a fraction of a second with no human in the loop. To see how quickly this is evolving, look at how quickly we moved on from Coinbase building a basic rail for machine payments (ie. x402) to Mastercard building a product to use it in the mass market (ie, Agent Pay for Machines).

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Nick Ewen, editor in chief of The Points Guy, tells me there are certain cards he considers “slam dunks,” and premium rewards cards aren’t one of them. People need to make an honest calculation not only of whether they’ll spend to use the benefits but also if this is spending they would definitely do otherwise. Otherwise, it’s not money back in their pocket, it’s money out of it.

Consumers should also ask themselves whether they really want to invest the time in tracking their points, utilizing the bonuses, and the like. Ewen says there’s a “wide range” of how valuable points are on the Amex Platinum, for example, and if you just want to use them for a statement credit because figuring out anything else is too hard, “that’s going to give you the lowest value on a per point basis.”

From: Premium Credit Cards Promise Rewards, but Change How Consumers Spend – Business Insider.

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One of Agarwal’s recent papers found that a small 1% cash-back incentive led to a 32% increase in spending and 8% increase in debt among cardholders. Consumers with lower amounts of cash on hand and lower levels of financial literacy showed the greatest behavioral shifts.

From: Premium Credit Cards Promise Rewards, but Change How Consumers Spend – Business Insider.

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Four in five Americans have at least one credit card, and the vast majority of credit card spending is on rewards cards.

From: Premium Credit Cards Promise Rewards, but Change How Consumers Spend – Business Insider.

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Strong digital foundations – shared digital public infrastructure (DPI), well-governed data and connected systems – enable governments to deliver services reliably, reduce duplication and keep pace with changing needs. OECD evidence confirms real and accelerating progress: data-sharing systems, digital notifications, digital identity and single digital gateways are in place across most OECD countries. Yet availability has not automatically translated into impact. Many services still cannot be delivered fully digitally from start to finish, because key components are missing or not yet consistently used across policy functions and levels of government. Extending adoption of (widely available) digital identity, particularly among users who face barriers of trust, usability and access, remains a challenge. Strategies and standards for data governance are common, but data quality management, reuse at scale, and impact measurement still lag.

From: Strengthening digital public infrastructure and data governance: Digital Government Outlook 2026 | OECD.

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Priit Liivak, chief government technology officer at Nortal, explores why the success of AI in government will depend not only on deploying new technologies, but on ensuring the digital infrastructure beneath public services is ready for machine users 

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Over the next five years, three shifts are likely to reshape digital government. Agent identity will become as important for software as digital identity will for citizens, allowing governments to know not only who is being represented but which agent is acting on their behalf. Service design for agents and machine-readable rules and obligations will increasingly become standard requirements in public-sector procurement, making government systems understandable not just to people but also to trusted agents. And legal frameworks will evolve incrementally, service by service, extending existing concepts of delegation and representation into the digital realm.

From: Why agent-compatible digital public infrastructure is the next investment governments cannot defer.

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But a new study from Ramp and Revelio Labs finds the opposite: The most enthusiastic adopters of AI are actually adding employees, not subtracting them.

“In a sample covering more than 21,000 U.S. firms,” Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian wrote on Tuesday, “We find that companies that invest heavily in AI grow headcount 10% over the two years following adoption. Entry-level headcount grows 12%.”

The study, coming nearly four years after OpenAI released ChatGPT, should cool down some of the inflammatory rhetoric about AI and job loss, or at least contextualize it. To date, there’s been no sign of widespread job loss despite the availability of AI tools that can do human work. That could change as the technology gets stronger, but there’s little indication that today’s AI tools are job takers vs. job makers.

From: Heavy AI Adoption Linked To More Hiring, Not Layoffs, New Data Shows.

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Box C: Digital identity frameworks
Digital identity frameworks, including the use of credentials (such as Legal Entity Identifiers or other verifiable credentials), could provide opportunities to enhance users’ payment experiences. For example, credentials could help users verify attributes to identify whether a requested payment is legitimate, lowering the risk of fraud.

Realising these benefits may also require a complementary trust service layer that makes identities and associated attributes usable, portable, and verifiable within real time payment interactions. We will explore these considerations further and welcome feedback from respondents on the potential role of digital identity, credentials, and supporting trust services in retail payment journeys.

From: RPIB consultation on the Design of the Future Retail Payments Infrastructure | Bank of England.

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Net revenue jumped 19% year over year to $2.5 billion, aided by a 31% increase in cross-border volume to $243.5 billion, a 37% increase in spending on the Wise Card to $43.6 billion, and 40% increase in customer holdings to $39 billion.

From: Wise grows revenue 19% in fiscal 2026 | American Banker.

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Against this backdrop, the FMA quietly issued a designation notice earlier this year declaring that NZDD falls outside the definition of a financial product under the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013.

It is the first formal indication of how New Zealand regulators view a stablecoin under existing financial law.

The FMA’s reasoning was relatively straightforward. Unlike shares, bonds or other investment products, NZDD is not designed to generate a return. The ruling found its purpose is to facilitate payments and transfers, rather than generate investment returns.

Because each NZDD token is backed one-to-one by New Zealand dollars held in trust at a local bank, the regulator concluded that treating it as a financial product would provide little additional protection for users.

From: What exactly is a stablecoin? NZ’s regulator has finally provided an answer.

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