building payments tech at Etogy, previously @visa and @globalpayinc, former lawyer, runner, father of 4
Alpine, UT
Joined July 2008
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The best thing about the new Sense and Sensibility movie is that there’s at least one good dog in pretty much every scene.
I was at a high school speech and debate competition today, and once again I was reminded that much of the world would vanish if people weren’t actively volunteering time and effort to make stuff happen.
I bet the BYU coaches are wishing we had only scheduled 6 games for the season rather than continuing to risk a loss.
I didn’t know that you get to keep the ball if you attempt a field goal on 3rd down. Thought you turned it over. What a strange football game that was.
My hot college football take is that refs should either call a lot more offensive pass interference or a lot less defensive PI. Receivers get away with so much stuff that the defense doesn’t
Key to the analysis:
1. How big is the market/volume against which the “toll” is assessed?
2. How easily can they grow/maintain share?
3. How expensive is the business to run?
Note that V/MC have take rates even lower than that given interchange flowing to issuers, not them.
I wish one of Utah’s local stations ran a feed for Utah footage like GBH does for Boston. It’s the best.
Scott Wessman retweeted
Ideal state is probably layered.
Trust:
1. your agent most to understand your intent
2. your bank most to safeguard your funds
3. payment network to enforce trx rules
4. merchants to fulfill specific orders
The fact that an agent understands what I want to buy probably shouldn’t mean it should have unilateral authority to move my money.
Ideally an agent provides much richer intent context to the FI. Like “she authorized me to purchase this car, from FB marketplace, for up to $25,000, before November 1.”
The provider could use that to approve transactions with greater confidence, and maybe get to more specific / less generalized fraud rules.
Lots of energy in agentic payments right now centers on how to properly constrain the agent in its use of payment credentials and authority.
But as time goes on, in the hierarchy of trust, I think my personal agent will be at the top—not my wallet, bank/issuer, or the payment network (and obviously not the other party to a given transaction).
The main reason is that I will trust my agent to exercise discretion more than I trust my financial partners to have the kinds of constraints that don’t get in the way of my agent doing what I want them to do.
The agent will be better at protecting me from bad counterparties and from myself than anybody else.
This assumes that the agent is good at what they do but that’s where the tech world is putting the most effort, so I suspect they will be (and indeed already are) very good.