Snippings

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Though mechanisms are improving for reimbursing victims, generally by the banking sector, the harm done by such frauds is huge. It includes not just the immediate losses and stress to victims and their banks, but also the erosion of trust in respectable sources of information and the financial industry.

From: How to block the financial scammers on social media.

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The victim was lured to the house under false pretenses before Woeltz – who was his former business associate – allegedly tried to extort millions from his crypto account.

The accused is said to have chained him up, electrocuted him, pistol-whipped him and threatened to cut him up with a chainsaw if he did not hand over his passwords.

From: Mystery brunette, 24, is tied to sadistic ‘crypto bros’ torture chamber at stunning $75k-a-month NYC mansion | Daily Mail Online.

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Last year, Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey published a paper titled Homebound which charted an “astounding change” in the time spent at home for every subset of the population and across virtually all daily activities. In the past two decades, time spent at home has risen among American adults by more than 690 minutes in a typical week. In the UK, the average time spent inside our homes daily is 18 hours and 43 minutes. Technology is shifting us away from the communal activities we once enjoyed outside our homes, leading us to an increasingly insular, home-based experience.

From: Trust fall – The RSA.

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I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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Ben Thompson has written a brilliant piece about this. He notes that micropayments were not viable at the dawn of the web (or since) partly because of the fee problem of the dominant retail payment system (ie, cards) but mainly, as I have previously highlighted,  because micro-transactions are (as Ben phrases it) anti-human: “forcing a potential content consumer to continually decide on whether or not to pay for a piece of content is alienating, particularly when plenty of alternatives for their scarce attention exist”.

 

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websites would be able to communicate to agents what they wanted to make available and on what terms, along with some vague hand-waving about new advertising models and transactions. The last point is valid: Trip Advisor sells hotel rooms, and O’Reilly sells training courses, and you can see a world where websites based on transactions can not only benefit from exposing themselves to agents, but in fact transact more (and potentially pay an affiliate fee).

From: The Agentic Web and Original Sin – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

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I’ve co-written a paper on this with Debbie Gamble, chief strategy officer at Interac, in which we identify the potential for a new payments infrastructure to both re-energise past propositions (e.g., micropayments) and create entirely new ones (supply-chain currencies). New transactions and new trade mean new prosperity so with the right governance in place, the payments industry can explore this entirely new frontier to the great benefit of the economy as a whole.

The paper is called Agentic commerce and payments: Exploring the implications of robots paying robots and it has just been published in the Journal of Payment Strategy & Systems 19(1), p.72-84 (Spring 2025) and you’d be mad not to subscribe to this August journal of record and read it now.

From: (9) The New Frontier for Payments – by David G.W. Birch.

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Over 40 Members of the British Parliament have signed a letter calling for the introduction of digital IDs in order to fight illegal migration, streamline public services and boost the economy. It is interesting, in the context of the current political climate in our United Kingdom, to see how the issue of illegal migration has become the first item on the agenda when it comes to discussing some form of digtial identity infrastructure. The Honourable Members say that a digital ID program could fight illegal immigration by tackling off-the-books employment which has been drawing migrants into the country, the MPs argue, and with some justification, given that the Mayors of Calais have been arguing for a decade that the UK should introduce identity cards as part of efforts to deter migrants gathering at the French port and attempting to cross the channel.

Right now, since we lack an identiy infrastructure, illegal immigrants simply buy fake documents. There are firms offering a full set of fraudulent documents for £5,000 or so. The illegal immigrants can then use the fake documents to make bogus applications to remain, or secure a job illegally. Thi sis not that difficult since most employers are not MI5-trained anti-counterfeit document detecting geniuses. Just to pick one random example from the newspapers here, an illegal immigrant from Algeria worked in a school for 20 years under a false name after using a bent Italian passport to pass the necessary checks.

(Now, you might well argue that in a country with heading towards nine million “economically inactive” people that if someone has been working, paying their taxes and staying out of trouble for 20 years than you should give them citizenship, but that’s a different issue.)

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Walmart recognizes AI-driven shopping assistants as an entirely new type of customer, distinct from traditional consumers.

On this, Walmart is developing its own AI-powered shopping agents, accessible through its app and website. These agents will handle routine tasks such as reordering weekly groceries and assembling shopping baskets based on user prompts.

However, the company is also preparing for a future where consumers may opt for third-party shopping agents built by tech firms, ensuring its systems are adaptable to external AI-driven purchasing solutions.

In effect, AI agents won’t just facilitate transactions; they’ll redefine how retailers deliver customer experience.

From: Walmart Gets Ready for Robot Shoppers as Customers Use AI to Shop Online – CX Today.

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Develop Direct Fulfillment Capabilities (The New Order Processing): There’s no reason a verified “buy order with payment” from an authenticated agent platform must traverse your standard e-commerce site. Explore direct connect APIs for receiving and processing such orders. This requires:
New Fraud and Risk Screening: Agent-originated transactions will lack traditional device fingerprints, demanding novel authentication and risk assessment models.
New agentic capable buy APIs with authentication (SRC, GPay, Link, …etc)
Product search and availability

From: Retailer Actions in Agentic Commerce | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Earlier this year, President Donald Trump said he had instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to halt the production of pennies, citing the high cost of production. Well, The Treasury Department has now placed its last order for blank pennies and will end production when these are all used. Given that each penny costs nearly four cents to produce, the move is expected to result in immediate savings of $56 million a year.

 

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I agree with The Cato Institute, which says that the case for producing these pointless coins is weak and that they are only minted because lobbyists harness nostalgia and “junk arguments” about rounding, but that’s a discussion for another day.

From: King Charles The Cashless: Forget About Banknotes & Coins.

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If you are interested in the subject of rounding, there is a very good paper on rounding written by Robert Whaples called “Time to Eliminate the Penny from the U.S. Coinage System: New Evidence” that was published in the Eastern Economic Journal way back in 2007. This confirms the European experience that dumping low-value coins and rounding prices is economically neuter. Rounding is not that complicated! Whaples wrote that a detailed study of convenience stores found the final digit of purchases, which usually involves multiple products and sales tax, was pretty much random so that “if you round it to the nearest nickel, the customer wouldn’t get gouged”. Sometime you’d round up, sometimes you’d round down. It balances out.

(Here is how they do it in Belgium where total amount payable in cash has been rounded up or down to the nearest five cents since December 2019: if the total amount payable in cash ends in one or two cents, it is rounded down to zero,  if it ends in three, four, six or seven cents then it is rounded to five cents and if it ends in eight or nine cents then it is rounded up to one euro. As far as I know, Belgian civil society has not collapsed and shops are operating normally under the circumstances.)

From: (7) This from 2020: Scrap the Scrap Metal – by David G.W. Birch.

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US Mint to do something more useful instead: $1 coins.

Yes, I’m brave enough to say it. It’s time to do away with the dollar bill. There is no $1 note in Canada, no £1 note in the UK, no €1 note in Europe. There are already more $100 bills in circulation than $1 bills, so let the $1 bill die a long overdue death and replace it with the more cost-effective $1 coin instead. For the Americans posting increasingly desperate online pleas for eight quarters to do their laundry what better news could there be?

A decade ago, the GAO calculated that the replacement of dollar bills with dollar coins would save an estimated $5.5 billion in costs over a generation.

From: China Has A Digital Currency, America Has A Coin Task Force.

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At its 2025 Dev Days event, PayPal not only a toolkit for AI agents but a Financial Operating System (Financial OS) tailored specifically for those agents—autonomous software that can browse, buy, negotiate, refund, and optimize transactions for users.

This isn’t just another product launch. It’s a foundational shift. With over 430 million users and $1.5 trillion in annual payment volume, PayPal is already a global giant. But now, it’s setting its sights on becoming the infrastructure layer for agentic commerce—a fast-emerging model where intelligent agents handle financial activity independently, on behalf of people and businesses.

The timing couldn’t be better. AI agents are gaining momentum fast. Per Gartner, they project that by 2026, 40% of enterprise workflows will be automated by agents. By 2030, the AI agent economy is expected to exceed $22 billion in value. We’re already seeing growth explode on platforms like AutoGPT and across open-source agent ecosystems on GitHub.

Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, captured this future well when he said, “In a world run by AI agents, websites may become obsolete. We won’t browse—we’ll instruct. The interfaces of the future are conversations, not clicks.”

From: PayPal’s Big Bet On AI Agents And Payments Like Stablecoins.

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I have not been to the Reflect Festival in Cyprus before, but I know a few people who had been before and they’d told me that it was interesting and a little bit different. Well, they were right and I had the opportunity to experience it for myself this year when I went to support one of our customers, the secure online payments company payabl, who were sponsors of the Money Stage at the festival this year.

The festival itself is quite a dynamic mix of start-ups and investors across a whole bunch of industries, not only fintech, and it was fun walking around seeing where the energy was coming from, and I apologise for the tired cliché, this crossroads between Europe and the Middle East.

I was invited to joint the Money Stage this year to give a talk setting out some of the key ideas around agentic commerce and to take part in a panel that explored the real-world impact of AI across the fintech ecosystem—how it is being applied today, what is needed to scale it responsibly, and where it is heading next. I had a great line up to discuss the issues: the payabl CTO Thekla Pashali, the Torus CEO Kirill Listitsyn and the future of finance expert Meirav Harel. We covered issues from data infrastructure and compliance to ethical considerations and innovation opportunities, the session will unpack the critical questions facing fintechs as AI moves from potential to practice.

I really enjoyed taking part in such an interesting discussion in front of such an engaged audience. Meirev summarised the key message as “banks must move now”, noting that if they don’t develop AI interfaces to their own services, Big Tech will. And when that happens, she says, traditional financial institutions risk becoming invisible—pushed to the background with irrelevant interfaces. She also discussed, along with Thekla and Kirill about the need for those of us on the technology side to spend a little more time thinking about the ethical frameworks that need to be in place to ensure that the benefits of the transition to bot powered business are distributed fairly.

If I were to add to this excellent summary, I would say (and it will be no surprise to you to hear this) that we really do need a stronger digital identity infrastructure in this space to stop the frauds, scams and malpractice from the real world from infesting the emerging ecosystem. Given the urgent need for such an infrastructure, my colleagues across Consult Hyperion and Fime are ctually quite optimistic because of the new security technologies that we have at our disposal (to give AI agents real security).

Sincere thanks to payabl for facilitating such interesting and educational discussions in the Limassol sunshine!