Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:16:18 · Clive Summerfield
And I say technology, and this is where, my particular interest is, technology that one validates identity and secondly validates that identity is real is becoming kind of central to any cybersecurity, profile, for many of these organizations.
00:16:38 · Kate Moody
[00:16:38] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, yeah, it'll be interesting as you say to see what happens in the wider industry, like how the wider industry responds to this, also what Binance do specifically as well, but a massive story and we'll continue to keep an eye on it. Okay. Our next story is taken from the papers and that is Mastercard partners with OpenAI on Agent Pay and AI transformation. Mastercard has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI as the payments giant looks to accelerate its push into agentic commerce. Mastercard believes AI agents will increasingly help customers discover products, make purchasing decisions, and complete transactions. However, CEO Michael Miebach Miebach, apologies, Michael, if mispronounced, acknowledged that Agent Pay commerce is still in its early days with transaction volumes remaining relatively small. The company is developing an entire ecosystem around agentic payments, including Agent Pay, which enables secure tokenized transactions, Verifiable Intent, which records what customers have authorized, and Agent Connect, which helps merchants become discoverable to AI agents. Shopify is already among the first major deployments integrating Mastercard's Agent Pay technology through Shop Pay. Wincie, come to you first on this one. What was your what was your take on this? What does it tell us about where the payments industry sees its next big growth opportunity?
00:17:52 · Wincie Wong
[00:17:52] S4: I think this is super exciting and super interesting. You know, the whole technology that they've launched about Agent Pay, which is about, you know, just making the payment. And then in terms of, you know, making merchants discoverable as Agent Connect, but then the verifiable intent is probably the major barrier that most people face. And by the way, love this episode. We're talking so much about security, I think, as well, which is such the bread and butter, I would say, of any good financial institution is trust, and being able to keep your money safe. So, that verifiable intent layer, I think, is what's really interesting. I think that they're right investing in this part of where things are going. I think agentic commerce is coming very fast. If you look to Asia, you've seen that they've already successfully launched Agent Pay in Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia, I believe. And also in China, they've actually built agentic carboards straight into the hardware, into the devices and into their cars, which is incredibly convenient. And I think that's one thing people will understand over time, convenience. Adopt... Convenience is what allows adoption to happen. A great example is a long time ago, you know, I'm aging myself now. I used to feel like I could not buy produce unless I walked into a shop, touched the tomatoes, the broccoli, and selected the specific one that I wanted to buy. Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring because I am happy for some random person to go and just pick a packet for me, put it in a box, and ship it to my house at the time that I want it to arrive. So things like agentic commerce is incredibly powerful because it will become incredibly convenient. In a world where we are over inundated as consumers by more and more things to do, there's a never ending list of things to do. Some of this load being taken off us for others to be able to do, like the weekly shop or or things like that, will be an absolute godsend to some people and to some families as well. So I think this is the right investment that they're making. I know that a lot of people talk about back when we were launching open banking, for example, in the banks, say that, oh, no. We're gonna lose the interface. I think one thing that I've learned through a lot of... Launching a lot of innovation projects at NOAS with consumers is...
00:20:34 · Wincie Wong, Kate Moody
This is a controversial thing I know to say on this on this kind of a show, but people just aren't that excited about their banking. They want it to work and they are very much pissed off when it does not work. And that is when they come calling and crying and things. So that's why I think the bank's job is always just to keep things running and make it easy for the customer. And Mastercard has not necessarily been the front user interface for people in a very long time, but they managed to make plenty of money. So I think there is definitely something in. So so this is very natural, I think, for Mastercard and their competitor Visa, who's also invested in this, to go into this in this way. [00:21:22] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. James, what was your take on the story?
00:21:26 · James A. Brown
[00:21:26] S5: Yeah. No. I suppose I was just gonna add actually that I agree we wouldn't say to some extent, but I think there are organisations now in the marketplace that have actually, and I'm not a big fan of the word gamified financial services. And I use my wife as the example here in that she hated everything financial services. You know, have I been paid? Can I go out and spend my money? That was the extent of it. When we moved back from overseas, she asked me the question, like who should I bank with? And I said, Just bank with Monzo. It's really nice. It's really easy. It's good user experience. Now it's, have you seen what they're doing? Oh my goodness, this is absolutely amazing. So it's quite a big transformation. But I think back to the story, I do agree with Wincie. It's a sort of next evolution, isn't it, really? Things have to progress. You know, when I set up Fintech back in sort of the early 2000s, it was the new thing. It was the new sort of like the new poster child. AI has obviously now sort of superseded that. So it's to be expected that big organisations will try and sort of like have that sort of first mover ability. When we're actually thinking about where do we generally spend a lot of our time, we'd spend a lot of our time transacting. It's just that they've taken it into the payment sphere to actually make it much easier. We're all very busy regardless of who you are, the job that you do. We're generally all we're all and I know you're going to talk about it later we're all hustling actually to sort of like get out of life what we want. The adoption of sort of agentic payment or agentic agents doing things for you, I think it's just another way to free up some of that stuff that was very precious, which is time, that we actually then can allow ourselves to then make the choice about how we want to use that time. Because, you know, I love Wincie's point, like, you know, we don't like doing the weekly shop. I mean, if people do, then that's a bit strange. But, you know, so there's a lot of functionality to things that we do when it comes to payment technology that this will remove and actually just give us or allow us actually to make different decisions about how we want to spend that time, either for ourselves or with our family or with maybe different hobbies.
00:23:43 · Kate Moody, James A. Brown
[00:23:43] S0: I really like to do the weekly shop if it gives me an excuse to leave my children at home and have some time alone in the supermarket, but that's not really about doing the weekly shop. [00:23:51] S5: Yeah, you do realise this is being recorded and it is going out so they might hear it. [00:23:55] S0: They're too young, it's okay. Clive, I thought it was interesting in this announcement as well that, you know, the the Mastercard CEO was quite open about the fact that, you know, actually current levels of usage of agents are really, really small. It's it's quite refreshing, right, to see there's so much hype around AI. Is it kind of refreshing to see someone being a bit more honest about how early stage this is?