Understanding BNPL Landscape & Credit Dynamics; Neobanks entering new markets will poach consumer deposits from banks; The Agentic Commerce Market Map by Artemis

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Video of the Week

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Deep Dive of the Week

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Mastercard Verifiable Intent vs Visa Trusted Agent Protocol

Agentic commerce breaks a core assumption of online payments, that a human is directly clicking “buy” on a trusted surface. Once software can browse, decide, and transact, merchants and networks lose the simplest security primitive: “the customer was here.”

That creates three concrete trust failures that show up as operational costs:

Merchants need a way to distinguish a legitimate, user-authorized agent from malicious automation and bot traffic, without rewriting their stack or blocking valuable sessions by accident.

Payment networks and issuers need a deterministic audit trail of what the user authorized, what the agent did, and what the merchant charged, so disputes and fraud decisions can anchor to evidence rather than inference.

Agents need a portable way to carry proof of authority across merchants, devices, and protocols, in both human-present and human-not-present execution modes.

Both proposals are “trust layers,” but they sit in different parts of the stack and they optimize for different verifiers.

Deep Dive: Mastercard Verifiable Intent vs Visa Trusted Agent Protocol

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This week’s reports

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1️⃣Sanctions in crypto just escalated again

2️⃣Stablecoins have moved from pilot to production in cross-border payments

3️⃣How Banks Are Building With AI

4️⃣SWOT Assessment of Agentic Commerce for Retailers

5️⃣Understanding The History of Agentic Payments

6️⃣Crypto Crime Is Becoming Financial Infrastructure

7️⃣AI Is Already the Operating System of Payments

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This week’s insights

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1️⃣An incomplete map of the crypto card universe

2️⃣The Agentic Commerce Market Map by Artemis

3️⃣The neobank landscape is fragmenting and converging at the same time

4️⃣Understanding BNPL Landscape & Credit Dynamics

5️⃣Neobanks entering new markets will poach consumer deposits from banks

6️⃣Agentic Commerce and the Potential Collapse of Card Payment Economics

7️⃣Centralised decentralised finance (CeDeFi) platforms misprice risk at the ledger layer

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An incomplete map of the crypto card universe

Look at the landscape and one thing becomes obvious: this isn’t a niche anymore. It’s an ecosystem.

You have infrastructure players like Rain and Bridge sitting alongside program managers like Baanx and Gnosis Pay. You have wallets, onramps, settlement layers, and regional issuers. Cardano-native initiatives appear next to multi-chain stacks. Kulipa and others focus on enabling issuance-as-a-service.

This is no longer “a crypto card.”

It’s:

– Stablecoin funding rails

– Program management and compliance

– BIN sponsorship

– Wallet orchestration

– FX and settlement

– Traditional card network connectivity

In other words, it’s a full-stack financial product wrapped in a card form factor.