Good morning & happy Thursday! Today, we're diving into Stripe Pay, perhaps the biggest enterprise payments announcement of the year, to see why Stripe is giving away the B2B transfers, and how that turns it into the payment network AI agents use to pay businesses (what Stripe Pay can and cannot do & the fine print behind 'free and instant,' why banks lose before Visa does, where Stripe's handles collide with Visa's plan for agent identity, how the launch ties into Stripe's lending push, & what to watch next + bonus deep dives into Why AI Agents Will Make Better Products Win [according to Stripe CEO], and The Agentic Transition Playbook inside), and unpacking AmEx's Q3 earnings to see why the 3,500 job cuts matter less than one line Stephen Squeri dropped about the middle market (how a one-time gain paid for the layoffs, why every company that moves its spend to Ramp costs Amex twice, how Ramp is going after corporate cash as well as card spend, & the Capital One move that would...
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