Clint Gilliam

Yesterday I posted on Visa. Issuers and acquirers are paying more to the networks - and Mastercard shows it again.   As reported 2 weeks ago, in Q3 2025, Mastercard’s payment-volume growth was +9% YoY, while network fees captured in Payment Network net revenue rose +12%.   The pattern holds: network-fee revenue is growing faster than the payments they support.   What it means: Your cost per dollar processed is creeping up. The network take per auth, per transaction, per dollar is rising - and that compound creep becomes structural margin pressure.   The impact: - Issuer and acquirer profitability faces steady headwinds. - Smaller players without scale or negotiating power feel it more. - Cost models anchored in yesterday’s fee structure are outdated.   This isn’t about a single-rate change - it’s a structural shift. Network-layer costs are growing faster than the volume they’re tied to.   If you manage a payments P&L, this trend should show up in your numbers already. Are you seeing it?    #Payments #Issuers #Acquirers #NetworkFees #PaymentsCosts #CardTraq

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Private credit just got a verification upgrade. We shipped three new capabilities on ZKValue this week — built for the institutions that need them most. 1. ICE Data Integration ZKValue now ingests ICE Private Credit Intelligence formatted loan tapes directly. 30+ PCI fields auto-mapped, format validation, collateral code normalization, and ICE-compatible export. If your data comes through ICE, it flows straight into verification. ICE built the data highway. ZKValue is the inspection station. 2. Mark-to-Market Benchmarks Compare your computed NAV against BDC market prices, dealer marks, ICE reference data, or secondary quotes. Deviation categorized automatically — aligned, minor, significant, or material. AI-powered analysis explains the gap. Fair value range calculated. No more quarterly surprises. Know where your NAV stands against the market in real time. 3. Secondary Market Trade Verification When LP stakes change hands, both sides need proof of what the portfolio looked like at the transaction date. ZKValue now generates SHA-256 Merkle proof snapshots — portfolio state frozen at trade date, cryptographically signed, verifiable for 90 days. Apollo facilitated ~$10B in secondary trading volume last year. Every one of those trades needed this. Who should be paying attention: Big 4 (PwC, EY, Deloitte, KPMG) — Your audit teams spend weeks reconstructing fund NAV from spreadsheets. ZKValue gives you a cryptographic proof to start from. Verifiable computation, not reverse engineering. Fraud detection with Benford's Law, collateral reuse screening, and DSCR mismatch checks built in. Audit efficiency measured in days, not weeks. PE & Credit Funds — You're reporting NAV to LPs quarterly. Your warehouse lenders want collateral proof. Your compliance team needs SEC Form PF and AIFMD reports. ZKValue automates all of it with cryptographic attestation. Continuous covenant monitoring catches drift between reporting periods. Startups with AI-IP — Your model weights, training data, and inference infrastructure are assets on your balance sheet. ZKValue values them per IAS 38 and ASC 350 with multi-method valuation (cost, market, income). Investor-ready, auditor-ready, M&A-ready. Secondary Market Participants — Buying an LP stake? Demand a ZKValue trade snapshot. Selling one? Provide it. Cryptographic proof of portfolio state at transaction date is the new standard for secondary diligence. The private credit market is $1.7 trillion. Default rates hit 9.2%. BDCs trade at record discounts to reported NAV. Tricolor showed what happens when loan data isn't verified. Standardized data is the first step. Verified data is the one that matters. Prove the value. Protect the data. www.zkvalue.com #PrivateCredit #AlternativeAssets #FinTech #CreditFunds #BigFour #PwC #EY #Deloitte #KPMG #PrivateEquity #LPTransfers #AIValuation #IntellectualProperty #AIIP #ZeroKnowledge #FraudDetection #NAV #AuditTech #RegTech #ComplianceAutomation #ICE #Apollo #VentureDebt #CLO #BDC

The Acquirer Divergence: Why Routing, Retries, and Signal Quality Separate Industry Leaders like Adyen, Stripe, and Worldpay from the Rest. A merchant switches acquirers. Same cards. Same customers. Same products. Authorization rate jumps five points overnight. On a billion-euro book, that's €50 million in recovered revenue. Not a rounding error. Tens of millions, sitting in the gap between one acquirer's infrastructure and another's. The merchant didn't change a thing. The acquirer changed everything: where the transaction was routed, how the message was constructed, whether a soft decline got a second attempt, and what data the issuer actually received. In the latest edition of my Authorization Intelligence series in my Payments Strategy Breakdown newsletter, I break down exactly where those points live. The gap between the best acquirers and the rest has grown to 5 to 12 percentage points for comparable transaction profiles. That gap isn't random. It's the result of a decades-long divergence in how acquirers think about authorization. The best treat it as a product. The rest treat it as plumbing. Here's what the piece covers. The four levers that separate leaders from the field: routing, smart retries, signal enrichment, and tokenization. Why individual features don't close the gap. Every serious acquirer offers some version of each lever. The difference is whether those features talk to each other. At most acquirers, they don't. At the best, everything shares context. That's where the compounding starts. Why merchants are caught in between. Enterprise merchants get world-class optimization by default. Small merchants on modern platforms inherit it through scale. The ones processing €100M to €500M annually are feeling it most. Too large for the platform subsidy, too small for dedicated enterprise attention. Why the correction is accelerating. Visa's VAMP program now holds acquirers accountable at the portfolio level. Mastercard is codifying retry intelligence into its rules. The orchestration (IXOPAY, Primer, Gr4vy, etc.) market is growing at 24 to 26% CAGR because merchants got tired of waiting for their acquirer to catch up. The acquiring business rewarded volume for twenty years. The acquirers who noticed the authorization rate was also a product built an entirely different kind of business. The rest of the industry is now catching up, pushed by network penalties from above and merchant defection from below. The question is whether your acquirer is pulling those levers, and whether you'd know if they weren't. Check out the Full piece here, which almost 8000 subscribers received this morning → https://lnkd.in/eBUwSK6B

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As it relates to payments within Muse, we view the current implementation as prioritizing time to market over being at the frontier of technical innovation in payments, with the initial launch highly reliant on Stripe's "Link for Agents" offering, with ShopPay and PayPal on track to be added shortly. Stripe's offering is highly reliant on two-step transactions where Stripe charges the consumer's card and then reissues a virtual card and inputs the second card on the merchant's website, which introduces a degree of inefficiency and calls into question who is liable for fraud/chargebacks (i.e. is it Stripe as the processor of the consumers card or the merchant as the processor for the virtual card). Longer term, we believe the technology will evolve towards the current wallet ecosystem, and we expect V/MA's agentic token platform to help streamline the payment flows, approval rates, fraud risk, and the merchant's ability to match incoming transactions to the end consumer. However, our overarching view is that now that consumer agentic platforms are going mainstream, it is much more clear that the card ecosystem is the default platform on which agentic payments are being built.

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Does Agentic Commerce signal an abrupt end for the growth of retail Open Banking PIS Payments? There’s an emerging blind spot emerging in payments arising out of agentic commerce. EMVCo’s proposed Agentic Commerce Framework will govern how autonomous card-based payments happen in the future. It covers identity, consent, trust frameworks, fraud mitigation and dispute handling, all the plumbing AI agents will rely on when they start paying for subscriptions, services and digital purchases without human interaction. This is, I believe, the issue ➡️ Open Banking (PIS) currently has no formal dispute or resolution model comparable to card schemes. ➡️ No equivalent to chargeback reason codes, arbitration paths, or liability waterfall models. ➡️ No mechanism for agent-initiated redress when a payment goes wrong. So when EMVCo defines trust rules for AI-driven payments, they will naturally default to rails that already have structured consumer protection and liability frameworks. That benefits: ✔ Card-linked A2A solutions ✔ Scheme-controlled C2C transfers ✔ Wallet-based, tokenised ecosystems …and leaves Open Banking PIS exposed, because from a risk and regulatory standpoint, autonomous payments require: 🧠 Machine-interpretable dispute rules 🛡 Real-time fraud accountability 🔄 Reversible flows with standardised remediation 🤖 Agent-negotiable refund logic Open Banking doesn’t have that today. So if the payments industry sleepwalks into EMVCo agent standards without ensuring parity of trust and redress, the outcome is predictable: ❌ PIS becomes the “less safe route” ❌ Merchants avoid (OR ABUSE) it due to uncertainty around risk and disputes ❌ Regulators side with the model offering clearer consumer protection …and we accidentally kill the only real alternative to the schemes just as AI supercharges payments volume. This isn’t a technology problem — it’s governance and standards alignment. If the Open Banking ecosystem wants to survive the transition to agent-driven commerce, it needs: ⚠ A standardised, enforceable dispute model ⚠ Legal + machine-readable liability rules ⚠ Shared fraud intelligence and misuse handling ⚠ Conformance frameworks at least as strong as cards Otherwise? PIS risks becoming another footnote in payments history remembered as a regulatory experiment that never secured durability - a bit like PayM...... To find out why this matters cast your minds way, way back to https://lnkd.in/egP8VaUK Food for thought whilst card transactions can benefit from TRA (Transaction Risk Analysis), Open Banking payments cannot....further twisting the blade...

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Most fintechs are still betting everything on one banking partner. That era is over. Today at @ifx, I sat on an amazing panel with payments and banking experts. The panel was about stablecoin and orchestration. The message was blunt: orchestration is the bridge to adoption. Volatility is the only constant now. Regulations shift overnight. Local and global threats pop up out of nowhere. Risk teams scramble, but their hands are tied to whatever vendor they picked last year. Next year, banking orchestration won't be a technical nice-to-have. It's survival. If you're still all-in on one provider, you're not agile, you're exposed. Every boardroom should be ripping up the old playbook. One integration, one fallback plan, one flow... that's a single point of failure on your balance sheet. Orchestration means flexibility. It means control. Lose that, and you lose speed. Worse, you lose trust. The winners will be the ones who can switch rails while everyone else is stuck in compliance purgatory. If you haven't built orchestration into your core stack yet, you're already behind.

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