SAN FRANCISCO — Credit card giant Visa has launched its blockchain-powered business-to-business payments service B2B Connect. B2B Connect can now be used by businesses seeking to make payments to 30 markets, with 90 more expected to be added by the end of this year. To start, it’s available for B2B transactions of $15,000 and up, which…
Catena Trust Bank received preliminary conditional approval from the OCC for a national trust bank charter – the first entity explicitly built for AI-agent financial infrastructure with deterministic policy enforcement and verifiable agent identity at the bank level.
Imagine you are sitting at your kitchen table, staring at a screen that promises to handle your life. It wants your email, your calendar, and your payment credentials. It says it will manage your subscriptions, book your travel, and keep your digital house in order. Now, imagine that screen belongs to a company that has…
Anthropic released its open-source Claude Commerce Agents blueprint on September 2, 2026, establishing a formal entry into the reasoning layer of agentic commerce. The release provides two prebuilt agents: a customer-facing tool for catalog search, comparison, and cart building, and a merchant-facing agent for inventory, pricing, promotions, and sales analysis. It runs on the Claude…
The trajectory of agentic commerce is splitting. Europe is prioritizing a regulatory-first architecture, while the United States remains stalled by a lack of federal guidance and unresolved liability questions. The same underlying technology is producing two distinct commercial realities. The European Regulatory Backbone Europe is utilizing the PSD3/PSR framework to define its deployment. The legislation,…
The infrastructure for agentic commerce reached a functional milestone on August 18, 2026, when AWS AgentCore Payments moved to general availability. This platform-level execution layer allows agents to autonomously discover, access, and pay for paid APIs, MCPs, and content. It supports the x402 protocol and the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), which Stripe launched in March…
The Securities and Exchange Commission is moving toward an exemptive framework for tokenized securities that would allow tokenized versions of traditional stocks to trade under specific conditions. This is the federal regulatory mechanism that determines whether tokenized equities can scale legally in the US market. If the SEC finalizes this, it creates a legal pathway…
Alchemy’s integration of AgentCard with Mastercard Agent Pay establishes a dedicated identity layer for autonomous software. By provisioning each agent with a unique email address, phone number, stablecoin wallet, and tokenized payment credentials, Alchemy is attempting to treat AI agents as distinct, verifiable entities rather than mere extensions of a user’s existing account. This is…
The crypto industry has spent years trying to build a better mousetrap for institutional finance. New blockchains, custom validators, vertical integrations—all promising to replace the creaky, legacy plumbing of Wall Street. Ondo Finance is taking a different path: it is simply moving into the house that already exists. By becoming the first tokenization platform to…
AI agents excel at product discovery, but they struggle to close the deal. While 132 million U.S. adults have used AI to assist in a retail purchase, according to PYMNTS Intelligence, the actual conversion rate for these autonomous systems remains stuck. Only 3% of transactions currently involve agents, revealing a massive chasm between finding an…