KYA Now

Identity is the basic building block for agentic commerce

Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle and architect of USDC, was one of the global experts quoted in Andressen-Horowitz’s “17 things we’re excited about for crypto in 2026”. He said that the bottleneck in the agent economy

“is shifting from intelligence to identity”,

which I think is a very helpful phrase. He further observed that in financial services “non-human identities” (which now outnumber people by two orders of magnitude at the very least) remain “unbanked ghosts”, which I think is another very helpful phrase. As he then went to say, and I could not agree more, the critical missing primitive here KYA: Know Your Agent.

Not New, But Fundamental 

Now, KYA itself is not a new idea. As Victoria Richardson and I wrote in our 2024 book “Money in the Metaverse”, the new economy demands a digital identity infrastructure in place not only for people and businesses but for things and, crucially, for bots. Given the advances in AI since the book was written, bots are even more central to that discussion now.

(For more background here’s something I wrote about KYA in Forbes a year ago and additionally, here is a more detailed paper about it that I co-authored with Jelena Hoffart in the Journal of Digital Banking.)

What is new, though, is the mainstream recognition that KYA is fundamental to the evolution of commerce and therefore finance. Without digital identity, we can’t have nice things, and that is as true in the agentic world as it is for the virtual and the mundane. This is no longer futuristic (or controversial). In one of their recent reports, McKinsey said that what they label “credentialing and identity” is the first of their key control points in the agentic economy because agents need secure, user-granted permission before they can initiate transactions across multiple institutions. Therefore, as they point out, organisations that already manage high-trust credentials start with a clear advantage. They go on to highlight some success factors: zero-trust architectures that never assume persistent access, dynamic consent via standardised protocols (for example, OAuth2/OpenID Connect, although I suspect new and more lightweight protocols might be required) and continuous audit trails.

Digital identity companies are already active in the field. Persona, the verified identify platform used by a host of fintechs (including Robinhood, Brex and OpenAI) has raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company says that the rise of AI agents, increasingly sophisticated AI-driven fraud, regulatory fragmentation, and growing privacy expectations have created a far more complex — and constantly evolving — identity landscape. As Rick Song, CEO of Persona, said

Identity in an AI-driven world isn’t about ticking a box, and the question is no longer ‘is this a bot or not?’ but rather ‘who is the bot acting on behalf of, and what is their intent?’

That is a problem that is simple to frame, but rather more complicated to solve.

At the heart of the problem is the need for agents to provide verifiable credentials in order to transact and there is an urgent need to get a framework for these credentials into place. As Sean put it, the industry that built out KYC infrastructure over decades now has just months to get KYA infrastructure into place. Fortunately we know what the building blocks for this are, because verifiable credentials themselves are well-established and well-understood and if you know what they are you can save time and skip the next paragraph.

A verifiable credential is some attribute of its holder that has been attested to by someone else. That someone else should be someone who is trusted (let’s not get sidetracked into what that means for now) by a service provider who needs to check that attribute in order to proceed with a transaction. So to take the canonical example, if I want to buy a drink in a pub, the pub needs to know that I am over 18, so it will want to check an IS-OVER-18 attribute. Now, an IS-OVER-18 attribute that is digitally signed by me is of no use to the pub at all, since they don’t know who I am and don’t trust me, but an IS-OVER-18 attribute that is digitally-signed by Barclays Bank is great, since they can easily check that the digital signature is actually from Barclays.

So the pub asks me to scan a QR code or tap on something, my phone tells me that pub wants to see a credential with the IS-OVER-18 attribute and I choose one (there may be several, of course) and then my phone sends it to the pub. But how does the pub know that the IS-OVER-18 credential belongs to me? Well, the credential contains not only the IS-OVER-18 attribute but also a public key. The pub constructs a challenge using that public key and sends it to my phone. That challenge can only be answered by someone who has the corresponding private key. This private key is in the secure element in my phone. No-one else in the world can answer that challenge. So when the pub gets the answer back from my phone, it knows that the credential is mine.

Now take the pub example into the world of agents and you can see why the solution is more of a complication: billions of interactions between agents that may only live for milliseconds means that billions of verifications will be required. As KYA (and digital ID in general) become more important, there will need to be a taxonomy of transaction types. What level of identification and consent is required for a $10 transaction? For $10,000? For a mortgage? For medical records?

I am not the only person to have noticed this, of course, and across the technology sector organisations are working on the building blocks for next-generation markets (and, indeed, societies). Towards the end of last year, Google launched Agent Payment Protocol (AP2), a secure, open standard is backed by industry leaders such as Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, Adobe, and Alibaba. Mastercard is developing its Agent Pay solution, and industry groups are working to extend Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) verifiable credentials into payments. Visa is positioning its global network as a backbone for agentic commerce in partnership with AI platforms such as Anthropic, Mistral AI, OpenAI and Perplexity as well as IBM, Microsoft, Samsung and Stripe.

Meanwhile the startup world is looking at the same space. Skyfire for example, recently launched Agent Checkout, powered by a new protocol called KYAPay. This is an open standard that gives agents verified identities and programmable payment capabilities to facilitate verification, control and reputation tracking. Skyfire has onboarded partners like APIFY and Forter to begin using the protocols, which is compatible with existing authentication systems, APIs and MCP servers.

OK, I think that is straightforward and it is already clear that agentic commerce will be enabled by standard verifiable credentials (VCs) of one form or another, we do not need to speculate about that. If I want to grant my agent Dave1A permission to go and book flights on British Airways and book hotels with Hilton, then British Airways and Hilton need Dave1A to present a credential that says that the agent is allowed to book on my behalf together with my loyalty identifiers and maybe some other attributes.

I think we can see a rough outline of stack forming here. As Victoria and I outlined in our book, if we give bots access to some kind of smart wallet to manage money and identity then we need infrastructure to:

• Provide agents with identifiers. To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, digital identity comes down to key management and key management is really, really hard. So…

• Provide somewhere for agents to store their private keys. I’m old school, so to me that means either local or remote trusted execution environments (TEEs). We could, for example, use secure enclaves in smart phones for local TEEs and cloud-based hardware security modules (HSMs) for remote TEEs and then…

• Implement a means for agents to present VCs on demand, which also means creating a trust framework for agents and their counterparties to use to mutually authorise and all transactions then to proceed. Here, I wonder if existing mechanisms and standards are sufficient: after all, agents may be created and destroyed in milliseconds, not the normal timescales for credentials.

Now, of course, it’s well beyond the scope of this brief note to delve into the details of this infrastructure, but it is interesting to speculate on who will define what such credentials might look like and the framework in which they will work, whichever protocols (e.g., Google’s AP2) are being used for the transactions. Mastercard and Visa are obvious players in that space, but it is early days, and I am curious to hear your view of the runners and riders.

Money 20/20 Europe 2026: Identity, Intelligence and the New Infrastructure

I’ve been going to Money 20/20 Europe for years now and I have to say that this year’s European edition, held in Amsterdam from 2–4 June, was the best organised that I can remember.

Partly this is because it felt smaller, although I suspect it wasn’t. The layout seemed designed to encourage conversations rather than simply maximise footfall. There was room to think, room to meet people and, perhaps most importantly, room to bump into old friends. 

What struck me most was not any single announcement or product launch, but the extent to which the industry has moved beyond experimentation. The discussion is no longer about whether AI, digital identity, stablecoins or digital assets might transform financial services. The discussion is now about implementation. The architecture is being built.

And architecture matters.

Because once infrastructure becomes embedded, it becomes difficult to dislodge. The decisions being made now about money, identity and intelligence will shape markets for decades. 

Stablecoins Have Left the Laboratory

If there was one word that echoed through every corridor, panel discussion and coffee queue, it was “stablecoin”.

Not cryptocurrency. Not blockchain.

Stablecoin.

What’s interesting is not the volume of conversation but its maturity. The industry has largely moved on from asking whether stablecoins have a future. The question now is how they fit into the emerging financial infrastructure.

I spent some time discussing exactly this on the MoneyLab stage alongside Simon Taylor and Nilixa Devlukia. Simon and I have been exploring the history and future of stablecoins for some time, and Nilixa brought the welcome perspective of regulatory reality to the discussion. 

What was noticeable was that audiences are no longer interested in conference theatre. They want practical answers. How will settlement work? What happens to liquidity management? What are the implications for regulation and financial stability?

These are sensible questions because programmable, always-on money is no longer a thought experiment.

As I argued in The Currency Cold War, money is a technology before it is anything else. When the technology changes, institutions change with it.

For businesses outside financial services, the important point is not whether stablecoins replace existing payment systems. The important point is that they make possible new forms of commerce: instant settlement, automated treasury management and contractual execution linked directly to economic events.

In other words, new plumbing creates new business models.

One of the conference themes was “Regulation in the Fast Lane”.

That title captures something important.

For years, many firms treated regulation as a brake on innovation. Increasingly, the opposite appears to be true.

The organisations moving fastest are often those that have invested most heavily in regulatory capability.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority was frequently cited as an example. Rather than standing on the sidelines, it is actively experimenting with AI use cases and working with international counterparts on future frameworks.

This matters because the regulatory burden is not getting lighter. Between the AI Act, MiCA, PSD3 and ever-evolving financial crime requirements, complexity is increasing rather than decreasing.

The firms that can navigate that complexity efficiently gain an advantage.

You cannot build first and ask permission later.

Or, more accurately, you can—but you may not enjoy the consequences.

Predictably, AI was everywhere.

Less predictably, some of the discussions were actually useful.

I have been spending a good deal of time recently thinking about agentic commerce: what happens when software agents begin acting on our behalf in financial markets and commercial environments. The interesting question is no longer whether AI can make decisions. It clearly can.

The interesting question is who is accountable for those decisions.

In recent work on customer bots and non-human customers, I’ve argued that retail financial services will increasingly be conducted not between banks and people, but between banks and the intelligent agents acting for those people.
That shift was visible throughout the conference.

One particularly interesting presentation came from Adyen, whose approach emphasised embedding governance controls into infrastructure from the outset rather than adding them afterwards. This is exactly the right way to think about agentic systems.

Later, I joined a debate organised by PPRO on whether AI would take over consumer banking interactions. I was joined on stage by Oceane Codjia, Simon Taylor and Shivani McCormack. 

My view remains that it will happen faster than many incumbents expect.

The real issue is not technology.

The real issue is trust.

The winners will be those organisations that can define clear boundaries around what AI systems may do, on whose behalf they may act and how their actions can be audited.

One of my favourite sessions was a panel on fraud that I had the pleasure of chairing alongside panellists Leda Glyptis, Breno Oliviera and Paul Weathersby. 

Fraud is often discussed as though it were a specialist payments problem.

It isn’t. It is a societal problem.

In the UK it is already the most common crime. It remains dramatically under-prosecuted and is growing rapidly as artificial intelligence enables synthetic identities, automated impersonation and industrial-scale social engineering.

The uncomfortable truth is that many attacks now succeed because they look entirely legitimate.

Rules-based detection is reaching its limits.

This is why I continue to believe that digital identity is becoming the critical layer in the next generation of digital infrastructure. It was the central argument of Identity is the New Money more than a decade ago, and I think the case has only become stronger.

The future lies in combining strong digital identity with behavioural intelligence: understanding not only who someone claims to be, but whether their behaviour is consistent with that claim.

I was fortunate enough to catch Google’s presentation backstage before the panel and it reinforced the point. The technology required to build continuous trust systems is arriving now.

The policy frameworks are beginning to arrive as well.

Particularly in Europe, the evolution of eIDAS and digital identity wallets may turn out to be one of the most significant developments of the decade.

If I had to reduce three days of conversations into a single sentence, it would be this:

The infrastructure of commerce is being rebuilt around intelligence and identity.

Stablecoins are rewiring the plumbing.

Artificial intelligence is rewiring customer relationships.

Digital identity is becoming the trust layer that makes both possible.

This is not simply another technology cycle. It is a structural shift in how markets operate.

As I wrote in Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin, the future of money is not merely digital. It is increasingly contextual, programmable and connected to identity. The journey is from money that we understand to money that understands us.

Walking around Amsterdam this year, that future felt a little less theoretical.

The organisations acting now are helping to define the architecture.

The organisations waiting for certainty may discover that somebody else has already built the platform they must live on.

Money 20/20 USA 2025 

Last month, David Birch was back in Las Vegas for Money 20/20 USA 2025 held at the Venetian Resort Conference Centre. This year, Dave’s sessions, which both took place on the packed Emergent Stage, were focused on AI and Know-Your-Agent (KYA).  

Panel at Money 20/20 USA 2025: Who’s In Control? Agentic AI & Future of Financial Power

Dave was joined on stage by Sophia Bantinidis, Head of Future of Finance at CitiBank and Greg Ulrich, Chief AI & Data Officer at Mastercard. The session focused on how AI assistants are evolving into autonomous agents that make financial decisions without human input. This raises critical questions about control and accountability in our economic systems.

• When AI acts independently, who bears responsibility for its actions?
• How do we balance automation benefits against the need for transparency and oversight?
• Who builds these autonomous systems?
• Who regulates them?
• And most importantly, who ultimately controls financial power when machines make the decisions?

Fireside chat at Money 20/20 USA 2025: The Know-Your-Agent (KYA) Problem And Potential Solutions

On day 3 of the event, David was back on the Emergent Stage for a fireside chat with Mastercard’s EVP Global Head of Identity, Dennis Gamiello. The session covered how we are entering the era of agentic commerce, which includes agentic payments and agentic finance. For this to function effectively, we need a process similar to KYC (Know Your Customer), but focused on agents instead of individuals. Welcome to the new world of Know-Your-Agent (KYA). Explore the importance and challenges of KYA in this new landscape. They started with the basics and went onto examine early initiatives in this field and discussed potential pathways to develop the next generation of financial market infrastructure, covering off the following questions:

1. What does “Know Your Agent” mean in the context of financial services, and how does it differ from traditional KYC? What kind of infrastructure or partnerships will be needed to build a robust KYA framework?
2. There is a two-fold challenge: verifying both the human and the bot. What are the biggest hurdles in verifying that a bot is truly permissioned to act on behalf of a human?
3. Bots operating 24/7 create friction when humans are required to complete onboarding. What are some real-world examples where this friction has led to lost revenue or failed onboarding?
4. The concept of agent safeguards is compelling. How is Mastercard thinking about leveraging machine learning to enforce boundaries and prevent hallucinations or unauthorized actions by agents?
5. From a consumer perspective, what’s the value proposition of agentic commerce? How do we balance convenience with security?
6. What’s your vision for the future of agentic identity? Will we reach a point where bots can open accounts, make purchases, and resolve disputes entirely autonomously?

As Banzpay summarised after the event:

“Agentic finance is coming—carefully. There are real challenges to solve around standards, risk, and governance. It was standing room only to listen into a discussion between David Birch and Dennis Gamiello from Mastercard who underscored There are real challenges to solve around standards, risk, and governance and that standardisation will determine how quickly the benefits show up in market.“

Money 20/20 USA 2025: Old friends and new…

Of course, it’s always lovely to catch up with old friends and make new ones as well as attend the industry events and play some blackjack!

Agentic Commerce & Stablecoins on 3 continents 

Over the last few months, Dave Birch has been on the road a lot, from Azerbaijan to the USA, focused on how agentic commerce and stablecoins are converging to redefine the future of money and financial interaction. He has explored how intelligent agents will become active participants in the economy (agentic commerce), requiring new forms of digital identity, trust, and regulation. Through his thought leadership, Dave connected the rise of stablecoins to this shift, arguing that programmable, tokenised money will power a new era of autonomous, AI-driven transactions – marking the transition from digital payments to intelligent, agent-to-agent financial ecosystems.

Fime Domestic Scheme Event, Paris – France

The “Agentic Payments” deck presents the emerging concept of payments made by intelligent agents – AI-driven systems capable of initiating, authorizing, and negotiating transactions independently – agentic commerce. It explores how “agentic” AI will shift financial services from human-to-machine interaction toward bot-to-bot (“R2R”) commerce, where smart wallets act as autonomous decision-makers within open finance ecosystems. The presentation outlines technological enablers like digital identity, APIs, and secure smart wallets, and frames strategic implications for banks, fintechs, and regulators as they adapt to a world where agents, not humans, are the primary payment actors.

INMerge Innovation Summit, Baku – Azerbaijan

The INMerge Innovation Summit 2025 (29–30 September, Baku Convention Center) is the region’s premier platform for innovation, connecting corporates, investors, and startups from Central Eurasia and MENA to explore breakthrough technologies, forge partnerships, and accelerate cross-border growth. Organized by PASHA Bank, it showcases cutting-edge ideas in fintech, AI, and Industry 4.0, David Birch had the opportunity to be on stage there twice this year:

Panellist: Can Emerging Markets Lead the Next Wave of FinTech Innovation?

The discussion highlighted how emerging markets across Central Eurasia, the Caucasus, and MENA have a unique opportunity to leapfrog legacy infrastructure and drive the next wave of fintech innovation. With regulatory frameworks, digital identity systems, and open-finance architectures that can be redesigned more freely than in established economies, these regions have a cleaner canvas to build upon. The panel explored the complementary roles of large incumbents and agile local players who are shaping innovation through local insight, trust, and scalable partnerships. Dave Birch underscored the convergence of identity, data, money, and trust, noting that emerging markets could pioneer agentic, mobile-first financial systems that challenge traditional models. While barriers remain the key question is whether these markets can move from imitators to innovators, developing original business models like embedded finance and super-apps. The consensus: the fintech race will be won not just by technology, but by readiness, collaboration, and vision.

Moderator:

• Ilya Arkhipov – Partner, McKinsey & Company

Panellists:

• Dave Birch – Author | Advisor | Commentator, Digital Financial Services
• Godfrey Sullivan – Senior VP, Products & Solutions, CEMEA, VISA
• Giovanni Everduin – Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, Commercial Bank International
• Samir Mammadov – CEO, PASHA Pay

Keynote: The Real Revolution in Banking: When customers get AI,
not when institutions get AI

Dave Birch presented “The Real Revolution in Banking”, arguing that the real disruption from artificial intelligence will come not when banks deploy AI, but when customers do – agentic commerce. He described a paradigm shift in retail finance as intelligent agents – AI systems acting autonomously on behalf of consumers – become the true customers, negotiating loans, savings, and payments directly with financial institutions. David outlined how this shift demands a new digital identity framework to authenticate and authorise these non-human agents, alongside the development of digital money and infrastructure for AI-to-AI (agentic) payments. His message reframed the future of financial services: banks must prepare not to serve people with bots, but to serve the bots themselves.

Secure Cash & Transport Association Conference, Chicago – USA

The Secure Cash & Transport Association (SCTA) annual conference is a gathering of professionals from the cash-in-transit (CiT) and cash servicing industries, bringing together stakeholders such as armored transport firms, banks, retailers, ATM operators, and service providers. Secure Transport Association. The 2025 conference, held October 1-3 in Chicago under the theme “Cash in Motion: Navigating Change, Seizing Opportunity,” focused on how the cash industry is evolving amid regulatory shifts, digitisation, technological innovation and changing consumer behaviour. Delegates engaged in sessions covering topics like ATM and CiT security, regulatory developments, AI risks, retail cash processing, industry trends and networking with exhibitors showcasing the latest cash-handling technologies. 

Keynote: Stablecoins from 1787-2037

In his presentation “Stablecoins: A Brief History (and Future)”, Dave Birch traced the evolution of private money from the copper tokens of 18th-century England to the digital stablecoins of today and beyond. He argued that every major technological era creates its own form of money, and that stablecoins represent the latest attempt to build currency suited to a digital, decentralized economy. Birch compared the industrial revolution’s “tradesman’s tokens,” which filled gaps left by the Royal Mint, with today’s tech-driven digital tokens issued by private enterprises to meet the needs of a new financial ecosystem. He suggested that, just as government eventually formalized and regulated those early private monies, public institutions will move to provide their own stable digital currencies. Looking ahead, Dave envisioned a future where tokenized assets and AI-driven markets form an integrated “Finternet,” ultimately leading to a world where the concept of money itself may dissolve into autonomous digital exchange.

Money 20/20 Middle East 2025 

Last week, David Birch was back on the road at the first official Money 20/20 Middle East 2025 edition at the RECC, Malham, Riyadh, speaking about everything from resilience in payments to agentic commerce. 

Fireside chat at Money 20/20 Middle East 2025: Rethinking Resilience in Modern Payment Systems

His first stage appearance this event was with Fime CEO, Lionel Grosclaude (Consult Hyperion are now the Consulting arm of Fime) on the Pulse stage. The pair have recently submitted a paper on this topic to the Journal of Payments Strategies and Systems which is due to be published next month. 

This discussion explored the invisible fragility of global payment infrastructure, why redundancy isn’t resilience, and how institutions must evolve. 

Speaking at Money 20/20 Middle East 2025: Deep Dive: Agents of Change: AI’s Role in Autonomous Finance

David’s next session was on the Executive Summit Stage where he was joined by Georgios Kolovos of Nvidia, Daniela Braga of Defined.AI and moderated by Jim Marous of The Financial Brand. From personal finance co-pilots to self-executing contracts, AI agents are becoming central to the financial experience this panel explored the architecture, ethics and opportunities behind agent-led innovation in fintech. 

As spectator Sanjiv Purushotham summarised on LinkedIN:

“Amazing session. It just grabbed my attention as I walked past. Stopped, gawked and was just bowled over by the awesome session with Jim Marous, Georgie Kolovos, Daniela Braga and David Birch. Incredibly powerful and intelligent discussion on the massive change in the role of finance coming out of the sheer cold logic of AI.”

Fireside chat at Money 20/20 Middle East 2025: Are We Designing Systems for People or for Machines?

David Birch’s last stage at appearance at Money 20/20 Middle East 2025 was on the infamous Off The Record stage (exclusive, private area at Money20/20 events where industry leaders have candid, unscripted conversations under Chatham House Rules, meaning what’s said there doesn’t get published elsewhere. To ensure privacy and candor, attendees’ phones are collected and locked in pouches upon entry and are only returned upon exit, preventing any recording or media presence. This confidential space is for senior professionals to share sensitive insights and discuss challenges like regulation, AI, and global expansion openly, making it one of the most exclusive stages at Money20/20). 

David was joined on stage by Andries Smit of inDrive and their session explored AI’s impact on trust, identity, fairness, and financial systems.

Tokens in 2050

Where do we go next with the new digital tokens of the post-industrial revolution?

Noted Fintech investor Matt Harris, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, predicted that fintech would mean the end of money as we know it. He wrote that in the future “our assets will be 100% invested at all times”. In this apparently radical vision of the future of money, transactions will be settled through the transfer of baskets of assets between counterparties without the intermediary of money. This world, in which assets are constantly on the move, sounds crazy – but Matt is right.

Early Tokens: The IBM Dollar 

Way back in 1994, I picked up a report from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI), a London-based think-tank, written by Dr. Edward de Bono, which had an immediate impact on me, coming as I did from the technology side of electronic payments and money. It was called “The IBM Dollar“.

The heart of the vision that de Bono set out in the pamphlet was that IBM might issue “IBM Dollars” that would be redeemable for IBM products and services, but are also tradable for other companies’ monies or for other assets in a liquid market. 

The difference between IBM stock and IBM money, for example, is that IBM stock is a claim on something that is exchanged through intermediaries.

But IBM money is at least money-like in that it’s a bearer instrument that can circulate freely until it’s used to obtain some service from IBM at which point the IBM Treasury can decide whether to remove them from circulation (i.e., burn the tokens) or put it back into circulation by using them to buy something. 

This will not be happening in a world of transactions between people but, as I wrote in my book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin“, transactions between what Jaron Lanier called “economic avatars” and what I lazily call bots. This is a world of transactions between my virtual me and your virtual me, the virtual supermarket and the virtual government.

This is my machine-learning AI supercomputer robo-advisor, or more likely my mobile phone front end, communicating with your robo-advisor to work out what basket of tokens it wants from you in return for one of my books or a speech to your conference.

Exploring the Transitions

Roger Osborne talks about how the effects of the Industrial Revolution spread far beyond technology and industry. He points out that the entrepreneurs of that new economy in time forced the financial system to change to accommodate their needs. By the time that the private tokens were replaced by a revived public money, the industrialists had built the new institutions that they needed.

In 1826 Parliament approved the setting up of joint-stock banks owned by shareholders with limited liability. This led to large-scale banks emerging in the industrial cities, a process that culminated when joint-stock banks came into the Clearing House, which allowed cheques to be exchanged between banks.

That period in history tells us how new money and banking systems were pulled into existence by the needs of industry. We can see how that period of creativity and economic growth adumbrates  the coming era of agentic business and industry, the coming together of the web3 and digital assets, digital identity and virtual/augmented reality with smart wallets at its heart.

Davis reflects on the transition from the pre-industrial financial world to the new industrial age financial market infrastructure saying:

This was an unconscious, unplanned and still underestimated transfer of constitutional sovereignty; a partial financial democratization that preceded and facilitated the advent of political democracy.

It must surely be that case that the new financial infrastructure and institutional arrangements of the post-industrial will similarly facilitate political change. The fact is that both the history and the future of stablecoins are more interesting and more surprising than you think.

The History and Future of Stablecoins

Stablecoins Unblocked Conference 2025

There’s nothing inherently dodgy about stablecoins. But there is something inherently dodgy about banking, which is why countries build elaborate regulatory regimes to protect deposits — Brendan Greely, Financial Times (13th February 2022).

When I stood before the audience at Stablecoins Unblocked a few weeks ago, I wanted to make clear that we are in the middle of the transition from one kind of economy to another (very different) kind of economy, one which will require a different kind of money.

It needs money that can support the growth of industries in, and economic activities of, the new economy and one of the most important ways it can do this is by using the technologies of the new economy itself to deliver the money.

As the government has not stepped in to provide this new money so instead technology companies have simply begun to produce their own money. Private money is beginning to circulate. Using these new technologies, enterprises have started to produce “tokens” that function as money and the market has responded by using them to facilitate economic activity.

Tokens have gone from being a limited solution to a specific problem to key elements of the infrastructure in the wider economy and, as a consequence, the government is now looking at them and wondering how to regulate them, how to manage them and what to do with them in the future.

Welcome to England in 1787.

Tokens Past

England was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and so it was the first economy to see the need for a new kind of money for retail payments. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the circulating medium of exchange was of neither the quality nor the quantity needed to support the expanding economy. 

As the currency shortage threatened to derail industrial progress, the new technologists of the day, the new-fangled manufacturers in the newly created factories, began to mint custom-made coins, originally called “tradesman’s tokens” around 1787.

These tokens served as the nation’s most popular currency for wages and retail sales until 1821, when the Crown outlawed all moneys except its own, a story told with exceptional clarity in economist George Selgin’s wonderful book “Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage 1775-1821” which not only examines the crucial role of private coinage in fuelling the first Industrial Revolution but also sheds light on contemporary private-sector alternatives to government-issued money.

Lessons from Stablecoin History

You may have noticed that the coins and banknotes in your pocket today are provided by the government, not by private players.

So what changed? And, more importantly, what can we learn from the change that will give us insight into the future of stablecoins?

I’d like to suggest four key areas where the lessons of the Industrial Revolution have some value to the pioneers of the post-industrial Revolution: these are technology, acceptance, finance and regulation.

TECHNOLOGY

Matthew Boulton’s high-quality private token coins were so successful and visually superior to official currency that in 1797 the government gave him a contract—backed by legislation—to mint legal copper coins, effectively outsourcing currency production to a private entrepreneur using new technology to curb the proliferation of unofficial alternatives.

ACCEPTANCE

Locally issued tokens and paper money, created in response to market demand rather than central authority, were efficient but prone to trust issues. These problems were gradually resolved as state-backed legal tender from the Royal Mint provided standardized, reliable coinage.

REGULATION

Ultimately, the government reasserted its monopoly on coinage. In 1816 , Parliament passed laws outlawing the circulation and production of private tokens. The motivation was partly ideological—reasserting state sovereignty over the currency—and partly practical, as the authorities became better able and more willing to supply coinage in sufficient quality and quantity using the new technology. In 1821 the government outlawed the tokens completely.

FINANCE

Finally, there is the issue of finance. By centralizing coin production, the government also kept for itself the “seigniorage” (the profit arising from the difference between a coin’s face value and the cost of production). Private mints eroded this source of revenue. The reassertion of monopoly was, therefore, also a fiscal decision.

In summary then, the production and use of these private tokens spread rapidly and soon many different issuers, including Big Tech (that is, factories, mines and manufacturers), produced several thousand different designs and types of token. Hundreds of entities became token issuers, a business that pretty much ended in 1797, when the British government responded by officially producing the penny and two pence coins to supply adequate small change while commercial banks grew to provide business-to-business payments.

In 2024, when the Stripe CEO Patrick Collison labelled stablecoins “room-temperature superconductors” for financial services (after paying $1 billion for Bridge), he was not being hyperbolic and when Stripe went on to buy Privy (which had some 75 million stablecoin wallets out there) in 2025 that sealed the view of stablecoins as mainstream.

Globally, stablecoins are on a tear and in almost all cases the cash and assets are the US dollar and dollar securities. The two largest stablecoins out there right now are Tether and the USD Coin from Circle which account for some $240 billion in circulation. This is not much in the $36 trillion US Treasury market, but the growth has certainly focused the US Treasury’s attention. 

Why? Well, I agree with Marc Rubenstein’s analysis on this: when I bought my first stablecoin, it was in order to play around in “crypto”. But it is now clear that stablecoins are decoupling from cryptocurrency and their adoption is driven by

“practical applications rather than speculation“.

It seems that Stablecoin transactions, broadly speaking, support real world business. 

Money 20/20 Europe 2025 

Last week, David Birch was back on the road at Money 20/20 Europe 2025 back on stage at the RAI, Amsterdam, speaking about everything from payments to digital identity to artificial intelligence (AI) with a host of friends new and old. 

Speaking at Money 20/20 Europe 2025: Robot-to-Robot (R2R) Payments Are The New Frontier

His first stage appearance this year was with his good friend, Debbie Gamble – Group Head, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Interac Corp on the Horizon stage in the Mastercard Lounge. The pair have a lot of experience sharing the stage together so the session did not disappoint!

David and Debbie discussed their paper on “Payments and Agentic Commerce: Exploring the business of robots paying robots” (which is now published in the Journal of Payments, Systems and Strategy) and helped the audience to understand the excitement around this new frontier for money. 

Key takeaways brought to you by Money20/20’s Aiana:

“The future of payments will be driven by AI-to-AI transactions, where autonomous bots will handle routine financial tasks on behalf of consumers, eliminating the need for human intervention in most payment scenarios.

Digital public infrastructure for bots is crucial, requiring new frameworks for digital identity, smart wallets, and secure protocols that enable safe and efficient AI-to-AI financial interactions.

Businesses must fundamentally rethink their approach to payments, moving away from human-centric models to prepare for a world where bots negotiate, optimize, and execute transactions with minimal human involvement.”

As their friend, Andrew Vorster pointed out:

My favourite session at #money2020 so far – David Birch kicking off with a history lesson about the American ice trade in the 1800’s followed by he and Debbie Gamble, ICD.D relating that back to how “Robot to Robot (R2R) Payments are The New Frontier” – entertaining and insightful wake-up call 💥💥💥

Moderating at Money 20/20 Europe 2025: Do I Have The Right To Be A Dog Online?

David’s next session was on the Summits Stage where he was joined by Marie Austenaa – Head of Digital Identity, Visa, Esther Makaay – VP of Digital Identity, Signicat and Lisa Forte – Partner, Red Goat Cyber. The panel unpacked the human rights and privacy questions behind Europe’s digital identity shift. 

Key takeaways brought to you by Money20/20’s Aiana:

“Digital identity is about privacy preservation, not just anonymity, allowing individuals to control their data exposure and prove specific attributes (like age) without revealing full personal details.

The European Digital Identity Wallet aims to provide a secure, context-specific way to share credentials, enabling transactions that require verification while minimizing unnecessary personal information disclosure.

While promising, digital identity technologies require ongoing vigilance to ensure robust security and prevent potential misuse, with mutual authentication and data minimization being critical design principles.” 

Panellist at Money 20/20 Europe 2025: A 1 in 50 story: Preventing Childhood Identity Theft

David Birch’s last stage at appearance at Money 20/20 Europe 2025 was again on the Summits Stage where this time he was joined by Aravind Narayan – Director of Digital Identity & Fraud Prop, LSEG Risk Intelligence and Riten Gohil – Digital Identity, Fraud & AML Orchestration Evangelist, Signicat. The team were brilliantly moderated by Renata Furst Galvao – Partner Manager, LSEG Risk Intelligence who bravely shared her won story of child identity theft and the struggles she went through to prove her innocence!

Key takeaways brought to you by Money20/20’s Aiana:

“Childhood identity theft is a widespread issue, with 1 in 50 children having their identity stolen, often by family members who have access to their personal information.

The current identity verification system is flawed, forcing victims to prove their innocence, and requires a complete reimagining of digital identity using cryptographic techniques and verifiable credentials.

Preventing child identity theft will require a comprehensive approach involving technological innovation, mandatory secure verification processes, and collaboration across industries to create a more robust digital identity ecosystem.”

Convera Podcast Recording: Stablecoins at Money 20/20 Europe 2025

After a million meetings with old friends and new, David Birch sat down with Akash Patel – Principal Product Manager, Convera to chat all things stablecoins for their upcoming podcast series. 

KYA KYB KYC in The Netherlands, Cyprus, Turkey and finally London

Last month, David Birch was globe trotting again highlighting his new organising principle throughout KYA KYB KYC (know your agents, businesses and customers), this time from a zoo in the Netherlands to a hotel in Turkey via a festival in Cyprus! As is the trend right now, hot topics included digital identity (of people, businesses and things – including your future AI agent!), artificial intelligence (AI) and non-human customers and it did not disappoint! 

KYA KYB KYC at the Dutch Identity & Access Management (IAM) conference

First up, David Birch went to the Dutch IAM conference which, this year, was hosted at the zoo in Rhenen. David took to the stage just after the sea lions had strutted their stuff! David’s talk entitled “Know-Your-Agent: KYA is the next big challenge for the identity sector” covered 3 main points:

1. Developing a framework for next generation digital identity that must encompass things that exist (eg people and cars) and things that don’t exist (eg companies & AI)
2. Exploring the implications and the inevitability of legal personhood for AIs and the business implications
3. Investigating the practicality of KYC for AIs and the potential technological options for identification, authentication and authorisation in the agentic commerce environment. 

KYA KYB KYC at Reflect Festival – Cyprus

After a late flight out of the Netherlands and a very early flight out of Zurich to get to Larnaca in time, David took the stage again at Reflect festival. David spoke on the Money stage which was sponsored by his good friends at Payabl where he gave a keynote entitled “Financial Services for Non-Human Customers – The ABCs of Digital Identity: Know Your Agent (KYA), Know Your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer (KYC)” which drew on David’s forthcoming paper in the Journal of Digital Banking, written with Jelena Hoffart from Mastercard, which looks at the demand for digital identity in a world of bots and makes some suggestions as to ways forward in this exciting new world of agentic commerce.

Following his keynote, David was joined on stage by Thekla Pascalli – CTO at payabl., Kirill Lisitsyn – CEO of Torus and Meirav Harel – Fintech Specialist at MHFintechs where the panellists went on to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining the landscape of financial services, powering smarter decision-making, automating processes, and enhancing customer experiences. This panel explored the real-world impact of AI across the fintech ecosystem—how it’s being applied today, what’s needed to scale it responsibly, and where it’s heading next. From data infrastructure and compliance to ethical considerations and innovation opportunities, the session unpacked the critical questions facing fintechs as AI moves from potential to practice.

David’s observation during his sessions at Reflect festival:

“If humans are already forming romantic relationships with AI, of course they’ll use AI for their finances”

KYA KYB KYC at FIDO Alliance, Istanbul

Next up, David headed to Istanbul, Turkey to speak at a private event for FIDO Alliance members where his session, of course, focussed on ID and AI in the form of “Authentication for Agentic Commerce” and where he covered:

The new era of agentic commerce is here, what are the implications for identification, authentication & authorisation?

1. The ABC of identification

2. The practicalities of authentication

3. The need for more granular authorisation 

Later that day, David also recorded a webinar for ACI and The Paypers where he gave a keynote entitled Agentic Commerce: the final frontier for payments highlighting key issues and his organising principle: KYA KYB KYC (agents, businesses, customers). 

He was then joined by Jelena Hoffart – Mastercard, Craig de Witt – Skyfire and Philip Bruno – ACI where the team explored how agentic AI is automating financial decisions, transforming engagement across the value chain, and reshaping what it means to compete in an AI-first payments ecosystem.

KYA KYB KYC in London, UK

And finally, after a quick check in at OMFIF’s Digital Money Symposium, David headed over to K&L Gates where he was joined by good friends David Parker and Judie Rinearson for a fireside chat ‘AI and Identity: Intriguing Issues and Opportunities’, where the panel explored the use of AI for ID verification and its significant impact on digital wallets and consumer protection. 

AI in Payments

These last few weeks, David Birch has been globe trotting from Thailand to Canada to talk about AI in Payments, particularly on the digital identity side as well as AI to AI (or robot-to-robot R2R) payments which he believes is where institutions should be focusing, saying that currently:

“they are very focused on what they are going to do with AI, but actually their futures will be shaped more by what consumers will do with AI.”

Money 20/20 Asia

At the end of April, David Birch was in Bangkok Thailand for 2025’s Money 20/20 Asia where the focus was on content focus, Empowering Humanity Through Collaboration: Pioneering Secure, Frictionless, and Sustainable Fintech Innovation in Asia.

On the second day, David moderated a panel session entitled ‘Building Digital Trust with Modern Identity Security and Orchestration’. The team shared insights into how robust identity security systems can shape a future of inclusive, secure and trusted financial services, with panellists Pepijn Kok, Linden Dawson, Natalie Reed and Ian Sorbello.

On the third day, David was joined by his fellow co-author of Money in Metaverse, Victoria Richardson, where they delivered a series of sessions around Digital Identity in the world of AI and AI Payments. 

• ‘Selling to Robots: The Digital Identity Imperative in Agentic Commerce’
  A fireside chat exploring how digital identity is enabling frictionless, automated transactions while ensuring compliance and security.
• ‘Navigating Compliance and Security in Digital Identity’
  David moderated this panel session which explores how businesses can address security risks, streamline identity verification, and create trusted systems that protect privacy and meet ever-evolving legal standards.
• ‘Brainstorm: Building Trust with AI in Digital Identity’
  A high-energy brainstorming session with Victoria Richardson on building trust with AI in digital identity!

Payments Canada

David Birch is currently in Toronto, speaking at 2025’s Payments Canada Summit where the focus is on 6 keys things:

This morning David took part in a Deep Dive session on AI in Payments alongside Debbie Gamble – Interac, Tom Hewson – Red Compass Labs, Vineet Dave – Google Cloud, Joe Greenwood – Mastercard, Chris Laws – Rhino Federated Computing and Johann Bryssinck – Swift. 

David’s Fime colleague, Xavier Giandomicci, noted that the room was packed and highlights included:

The session on the Impact of AI-powered customers on banking:

« Smart wallets will do things better than me, I dont want to bother about most of those buying decisions », Dave.

Debbie « We need to think about the ethics aspect but also about the new governance required »