Mastercard wants to be the toll road for AI shopping 🤖💳; Bermuda is now a laboratory for onchain finance 🪙🇧🇲

FinTech is Eating the World, 22 January

Hey Everyone,

Good day & happy Thursday! Today, all eyes are on Mastercard, which clearly wants to be the toll road for AI shopping (what their recent partnerships and announcments actually mean & why this could be huge + bonus deep dive into Google’s UCP, OpenAI’s Super App ambitions, and the analysis of Mastercard’s latest financials inside), and Bermuda that’s now a laboratory for onchain finance (what Coinbase & Circle are trying to do and why it’s one of the most interesting experiments in FinTech + bonus deep dives into Coinbase & Circle inside). So let’s jump straight into the interesting stuff 🌶️

Mastercard wants to be the toll road for AI shopping 🤖💳

Following the (AI) money 💸 The most important infrastructure in any gold rush isn’t the pickaxe - it’s the assay office that certifies the gold is real.

That’s exactly why payments giant Mastercard MA 0.00%↑ just announced it’s joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol while simultaneously integrating its Agent Pay product into Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout and OpenAI’s Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. The company is also refocusing Start Path, its decade-old startup accelerator, on AI commerce ventures.

On the surface, this looks like a payments giant doing routine partnership deals. Look closer, and you’ll see a company making an aggressive bet on who captures value when machines start spending money.

Let’s take a quick look at this, break it down to understand why it matters.