Good morning & happy Thursday! Today's issue is a special one as we're going to dive into Revolut, which finally got its full UK banking licence (why the licence itself isn't news, what it really reveals & what's next for the $75B FinTech behemoth + bonus reads on Revolut & how it's leveraging AI internally), corporate spend leader Ramp, which just gave AI Agents their own credit cards (why it's a big news, how it perfectly ties into the agentic stack Ramp has been quitely building for months & what's next in Agentic Payments/Finance + bonus deep dive into the brilliant rivarly of Brex vs. Ramp), and Elon Musk's X Money that's finally launching to public next month (why banking isn't the real product here, what Elon's master plan really is & what to whatch next + bonus deep dive into Muskonomy, the closed-loop economy no bank can touch). Let's jump straight into the fascinating stuff ''...

Good morning & happy Wednesday! Today's issue is super hot as we're looking into Mastercard and Google, which just open-sourced the missing trust layer for AI that spends your money (what Verifiable Intent is all about, why it matters and how it will change Agentic Commerce & Agentic Payments + bonus deep dives into Mastercard & Visa's latest financials, and how Google's building the Android of Commerce), and Nasdaq's tokenization play (why it's not about 24/7 trading at all, where the real value unlock is & what to expect next). So let's just jump straight into the finnovative stuff '' Last week, Mastercard quietly released Verifiable Intent, an open-source framework that creates cryptographic proof an AI agent is doing exactly what its human authorized - nothing more, nothing less. The agent can act autonomously, but the boundaries are tamper-evident and auditable. It's built on SD-JWTs aligned with W3C Verifiable Credentials and works across Google's Agent Payments Protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol, and anything else that wants to plug in....

The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI's disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out. Yang has talked with computer-science majors, he said onstage, who can't find a job and are instead 'driving Ubers to make ends meet.' His doomsaying is extreme but familiar: Fears of job losses are mounting as AI continues to rapidly advance. A new generation of AI agents are more capable than traditional chatbots of assisting with sophisticated computer work. Bots are no longer limited to searching the web and answering questions'they can create financial models, generate slide decks, and much more. Perhaps the most concerning sign yet of an impending jobs crisis came one day after Yang's announcement. The payments firm Block, which operates Square and Cash App, announced that it was laying off roughly 4,000 workers'nearly half of the company's workforce'due to AI. 'The intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,' Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, wrote. Going forward, he added, the company will be laser-focused on integrating AI across layers of its operations....

Good morning & happy Tuesday! FinTech IPOs are back, so today all eyes are on Japanese mobile payments giant PayPay that's expected to price this week on the Nasdaq under the ticker $PAYP ' We're talking about a SoftBank-backed Super App with 72 million users that just went from burning cash to printing 30% EBITDA margins in just under 2 years, and now it's coming to market at a valuation that got marked down from ~$19.6B to ~$12.4B thanks to macro jitters, not business problems ' We're going to unpack the closed-loop payments model, the lending engine hiding inside, and the SoftBank governance question to figure out whether this is the most asymmetric fintech IPO setup in years (plus, cornerstone bets from Visa, Qatar Holding, and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority tell you the smart money is already paying attention & a bonus dive into Brazil's PicPay inside). Let's jump straight into the fascinating stuff '' Following the money ' FinTech IPOs are back, and Japanese FinTech giant PayPay Corporation is bringing to the U.S. public markets what amounts to a monopoly-in-formation over Japan's '273 trillion (~$1.8 trillion) consumer payments economy....