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New research from LINK, the operator of the UK’s ATM network, highlights just how much payment habits are shifting. Its latest findings show that a growing number of high street businesses are going cashless, with 14% of shops stopping the acceptance of notes and coins over the past 12 months.

From: Cashless trend grows as one in seven UK high street shops ditch cash.

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When a customer authorizes an agent to make purchases, Stripe provisions an agentic network token from Mastercard or Visa scoped to the customer’s intent and shares it with the agent. The agent can then use these tokens across any seller accepting agentic payments and anywhere Mastercard or Visa is accepted. The network then handles secure credential translation, verification, and authorization. This allows agents to vault agentic network tokens with Stripe once and use them across multiple sellers in alignment with the customer’s intent. 
Agentic network tokens function similarly to card-on-file network tokens: payment networks automatically map the agentic network token to the latest FPAN when sending authorization requests to the issuers. They also add additional information in the authorization message for the issuers to make informed authorization and provisioning decisions, and manage disputes and fraud.

From: Supporting additional payment methods for agentic commerce.

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Agents might have turned out to be perfect optimizers who select a card for the consumer based on the best rewards proposition for that specific purchase. The “race to the bottom” on steroids. This could still happen, but is harder without an Agentic wallet.

From: (18) Agentic Commerce hits speed bumps – by Andrew M. Dresner.

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Customer loyalty is dead. 76% of consumers are ready to switch their financial provider for better digital money-management features available through open finance, and 44% already have.

That’s a tidal wave, and the result of surveying 8,000 consumers across 11 markets by Mastercard and FT Longitude.

From: Bank Customer Loyalty is Dead: 89% of Your US Customers Are Ready to Walk, 76% Global.

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The big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions for themselves. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have, because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals will not be the customers: their bots will be.

From: Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking | HSTalks.

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Mercor, an AI company valued at $10 billion, has been the victim of a major data breach which appears to include ID documents along with user face and voice biometrics.
The highly valued startup supplies training data to major artificial intelligence companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. The three‑year‑old firm said the breach was tied to a wider supply chain attack on the open‑source library LiteLLM.
Mercor told Fortune it was “one of thousands” impacted after malicious code was inserted into LiteLLM, a tool widely used by developers to connect applications to AI services.

From: AI company’s breached biometrics, ID document images make deepfake fraud easier | Biometric Update.

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Miebach also raised doubts about identity verification, asking, “Is the agent actually what the agent claims to be?”

From: Mastercard CEO shares grave concerns over AI agentic commerce – TheStreet.

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The CFTC proposed a new rulebook for prediction markets in the US. The framework would allow most sports-related bets while trying to avoid inviting obvious manipulation.
Under the new rules, contracts on player injuries, officiating outcomes, “first-pitch” bets, player ejections, and virtually all bets on war, terrorism, or assassinations would be barred as not in the public interest.
The proposal is notable for what it doesn’t do: No raising the minimum age from 18 to 21, no ban on athlete prop bets, and no return to Biden-era election betting restrictions. It formally rescinds the 2024 ban on sports-related event contracts, replacing prohibition with regulated permission — a win for Kalshi and Polymarket.
Scrutiny of prediction markets has grown due to well-timed trades ahead of Trump’s major policy surprises. Those trades netted millions for unknown traders, and alleged insider trading cases have multiplied: a Special Forces soldier bet on Maduro’s capture, George Santos wagered on his own State of the Union attendance, and many Trump insiders have allegedly bet on policy announcements right before the President’s Truth Social tweets.
Little wonder, then, that the rulemaking doesn’t have much to say about insider trading.

From: In prediction markets, the house always wins (TWIF 6/12).

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A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT.

From: KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI.

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San Francisco-based Meow Technologies launched what it’s calling the first agentic banking platform. AI agents can now open business checking accounts, issue corporate cards, send and receive payments, and manage invoicing autonomously. The platform integrates with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini via an MCP endpoint at meow.com/mcp.

From: (13) Issue #154: AI Agents Get Bank Accounts, Your PFM Is Now an LLM, And Aspire Enters the US.

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