THE FINTECH INTERVIEW

THE YEAR APPLE PAY AND TOKENISATION LAUNCHED AT MONEY20 / 20

The consumer-facing product received significant attention, but the underlying tokenisation infrastructure represented the more substantial shift.“ At the time, everyone was more focused on Apple and Apple Pay, but I think Ed would agree with me that tokens was the main message,” Jim says.

Visa and Mastercard have issued more than 40 billion tokens since then. Agentic commerce represents the next phase of this infrastructure evolution, where AI agents conduct transactions on behalf of consumers.“ Agentic is the next wave of it, and it’ s just unleashing a whole new wave of use cases, all of which drive commerce into the future in a more safe and sound manner,” he says.

The technical requirements involve new protocols for identity binding using passkeys and agent tokens. Thredd is working with Visa and Mastercard on implementing these protocols as they develop. The challenge centres on enabling commerce when the transaction originates from an AI agent rather than a direct consumer action.“ As we think about the future from an AI perspective, not only is there expense savings and efficiency savings in terms of the core processing aspects, we’ re already thinking about how we work with Visa and Mastercard as they introduce the new protocols that drive new ways to bind identity using passkeys and agent tokens to make commerce more easy and seamless. We work with our partners and our clients to allow them to come up with great new use cases that leverage all these new innovations and protocols.”

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