Snippings

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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!

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A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.” In a ruling submitted last week,

From: Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’ | The Verge.

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Or there’s the Belgian man who posted online that “his crypto wallet was now worth €1.6 million.” His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks.

From: We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution – Ars Technica.

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Fortune India

 

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The objective of UPI was to create an indigenous Indian system. In contrast, two US-headquartered companies—Walmart and Google—dominate the space now. Even Amazon and WhatsApp, both headquartered in the US, are trying to get a shoo-in.

From: PhonePe outage rekindles debate on UPI market cap: Should NPCI finally act?.

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In the UK, consumers have been warned again about “cloning scams”, where criminals duplicate a legitimate company’s website, email or a fake WhatsApp group to persuade consumers to send them payments, after these scams grew by half last year.

The growth of these kinds of frauds are inevitable in an environment that lacks even the most rudimentary identity infrastructure and is yet another reason why the advent of consumer agents to handle financial services, automated personal treasury deparsmenrs, cannot come soon enough. Whereas scammers might be able to copy an investment bank’s graphics and text, they cannot copy its digital signatures or verifiable credentials. Even the most basic AI-powered consumer CFO would be able to spot the scam.

In May 2025, the Indian mobile payment service PhonePe (which along with Gpay handles more than four-fifths of the country’s mobile payments) went down. There was a network failure because of cybersecurity exercises associated with India-Pakistan tensions, meaning that consumers were unable to make payments or transfer funds. The outage rekindled debates around the over-dependence of the UPI ecosystem (which last month handled 18 billion transactions) on relatively few key players, and foreign-owned players at that (PhonePe is owned byy Walmart and GPay is Google), not simply from a business perspective but as source of systemic risk.