Snippings

In 2019, I wrote in Wired magazine that the real revolution in banking would be when customers got AI, not when banks got AI. I stand by that prediction and when I see the energy going into the agentic commerce, and therefore agentic payments, space I begin to think that, if anything, I was underhyping the impact.

In 2020, Cathy Hackl wrote that “marketing is about to change, and marketeers will needed to add business-to-robot-to-consumer (B2R2C) to their duties”.

In 2022, Gartner surveyed executives and found that they believed that by 2030, a quarter of consumer purchases would be “substantially delegated” to bots, suggesting a market shift roughly twice as large and twice as fast as the historical arrival of e-commerce. That too may have seemed a trifle hyperbolic at the time.

In 2023, the Alan Turing Institute in the UK published a paper on “The AI Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges for the Finance Sector”, which higlighted the information asymmetry between financial institutions and individuals and noted that it can be attacked using “digital financAI to enable individuals to access credit, save money, make deposits, withdraw, transfer, and pay for goods and services using a mobile device with AI intelligence.

In 2024

In 2025

Well, we’re not out of 2025 yet and we’ve already seen the 

A2P

AGP

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Machine customers represent the biggest new growth opportunity of the decade, but they don’t make decisions the way humans do. As more increasingly smart devices are connected to the internet and more people use intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana, the commercial possibilities are staggering. Trillions of dollars will progressively slide into the hands — or should we say processors — of nonhumans.

From: Machine Customers Will Decide Who Gets Their Trillion-Dollar Business.

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As of 2024, 96% of the UK population were mobile phone users,

From: UK Mobile Phone Statistics 2025 – Stats Report – Uswitch.

There is as you would expect a variation in mobile phone use across the age groups. Penetration is 100% in the 16-24 age group but only around 75% in the 65+ age group. Even if penetration were effectively total, there would of course still be a need to provide services to the small number of people who cannot use phones because of (for example) disability or who simply cannot afford to pay for one.

 

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In the real world, Switzerland is preparing a national digital identity, and issues of privacy have been prominent, especially as the Digital Identity and Data Sovereignty Association (DIDAS) has been working with the Swiss government to ensure users cannot be tracked through the e-ID. “Switzerland actually works very hard in ensuring unlinkability of you moving across the web,” Daniel Säuberli, president of DIDAS, said in May.

From: Microsoft introduces ZKPs with unlinkability to preserve digital ID privacy | Biometric Update.

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In 1758, an English mail coach carrying banknotes was robbed. The robber used one of the stolen banknotes to pay for a room at an inn. The original owner of the banknote asked the Bank of England to stop payment of the note, whereupon the innkeeper sued. The case of Miller v Race rose to England’s highest court judge, who ruled that the innkeeper was the rightful owner of the banknote.

The judge, Lord Mansfield, opined that if a merchant always had to question whether there might be an upstream property interest in a banknote then the notes could not be used to grease the wheels of commerce. Therefore a banknote made out to bearer and payable on demand must be treated as currency — a medium of exchange.

Fast forward to today and a popular form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins is facing challenges similar to those faced by banknotes in 18th-century England.

From: Stablecoins should be treated as currency.

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On September 27 1825 a steam train crowded with excited passengers travelled 26 miles from Shildon via Darlington to Stockton in north-east England. It broke down on route, and one man fell off and had his foot crushed. But the journey is recognised as the birth of the railway age, which was to transform human mobility, business and social life around the globe.

From: A new age of the train.

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Every transaction is laden with inherent risks (credit risk, fraud risk, settlement risk) and is subject to a dense web of regulatory obligations that technology alone cannot address. Thus payment networks’ core purpose is to create trust and certainty.

From: Governance in Payments | Noyes Payments Blog.

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The bull case for disruptive network growth revolves around a significant expansion in the type of commercial interactions that the card networks can manage (ie, governance). See Networks, Value Assembly and Organizational Structures
Governance is MORE importance in the age of AI and Agents as machine to machine trust is even HARDER to manage.

From: Governance in Payments | Noyes Payments Blog.

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I will argue that card networks have a significant opportunity to expand their governance, both in non card and in non-payment.

From: Governance in Payments | Noyes Payments Blog.

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For VCs to be viable beyond low-risk use cases, they must be embedded within a governance framework that provides the “commercial accountability” to complement the “cryptographic assurance”.

From: Governance in Payments | Noyes Payments Blog.

Indeed. The core issues of liability and interchange must be agreed if we are going to see any progress at all. Now, it is clearly not beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to come up with an optimisation to balance the interests of the stakeholders with the interests of society as a whole. One ancient template for such might be found buried in the sedimentary layers of digital identity from the early days. Identrust opted for a (bank-centric) model of transactional liability. In other words, if you say that I am Dave Birch, and I use that credential to get a loan, and it then turns out I am not Dave Birch at all, then you should be liable for the loan default, but not for any contingent liabilities.

This must be linked to an interchange model that maybe charges different interchanges amounts depending on the nature of the transaction, not the size of the transaction. Buying a beer with proof of age, 0.002 cents. Buying a house with proof of mortgage offer, $20 or something.