The Wallet Wars

The article argues that the real contest in agentic commerce is over who lets an AI agent transact as the consumer, not just who helps it pay, and that the industry should move from walled-garden virtual cards toward open standards with scoped agentic tokens. It says Stripe's Link, Shopify's Shop Pay and PayPal, with 300M, 250M and 400+M users respectively, are competing to connect wallets to agents. It describes Link's single-use virtual cards as creating two transactions, which can break loyalty rewards, such as a Walmart+ offer. It also says card networks have announced agentic standards: Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard AgentPay and AMEX ACE.