Visa unveiled the Visa Intelligent Commerce program which opens the network’s rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and now pay on behalf of consumers. “This is going to transform shopping and buying — we’re letting AI developers and engineers use the Visa network to allow AI agents to find, and buy, on [the consumer’s] behalf in a seamless and safe way,” Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of consumer products, told. At the center of the effort is an AI-ready card, a credential developers can spin up through a bundle of Visa application programming interfaces (APIs). As Nelsen put it: “The APIs will have an AI-ready card. In a hypothetical search for the cheapest flight to Cancún, for example, a traveler uploads an existing Visa credential, while in the background Visa authenticates the cardholder with payment passkeys, tokenizes the 16-digit number and seats the token inside the AI agent.” That behind-the-scenes swap shields account data, eliminating the clunky step of keying in card numbers every time the agent hops to a new site.
Sendbird launches omnipresent proactive customer support AI agent enabling continuity across channels
Sendbird Inc., an AI communications and conversation platform, launched what the company calls an “omnipresent” AI agent that can handle customer service issues proactively rather than just reacting to them. Omnipresence means the company’s AI agent can engage and respond to customers wherever they are: web, mobile, email, SMS, WhatsApp and voice – all without losing track of the conversation history. This means that a user could start a conversation on the web, grab their phone to leave the house and continue talking to the AI agent and it could pick up where it left off. The company believes by allowing users to pick a preferred point of contact they can feel more connected and part of the process. The second promise of the company’s AI agent is proactive support, where AI agents react to potential problems and conversation moments before a customer contacts support. For example, when a delivery is on its way it might contact the customer on the last channel they messaged to provide an update. It can also anticipate disruptions such as flight delays, allowing real-time outreach and rescheduling. Sendbird’s AI agent empowers businesses to move beyond siloed, reactive interactions to memory-rich customer experiences that reduce friction, anticipate needs and improve loyalty all at the same time.
World partners with Tinder, Visa to bring its ID-verifying eyeball-scanning Orb devices to more places
World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the identities of Tinder users in Japan using World’s identity verification system. Additionally, World has established separate collaborations with both the prediction market startup Kalshi and the decentralized lending platform Morpho; these partnerships enable customers to sign in to these services using their IDs already registered with World. And World plans to team up with Visa to launch The World Card, a card that lets users spend digital assets anywhere Visa is accepted. With these new partnerships, World is going after a broader audience — one that previously might not have considered having their eyeballs scanned to verify their “humanness.” The World Card is perhaps the most interesting of the new projects. Expected to become available in the U.S. later this year, it’ll connect to World’s World App and allow users to transact with cryptocurrencies. The card will automatically exchange crypto to fiat when needed, and potentially offer certain rewards for specific “AI subscriptions and services.” Also announced a collaboration with Stripe to allow users to pay with World on Stripe-enabled websites and apps.
Nuvo to extend B2B trade infrastructure- enabling companies to exchange critical trust signals, including verification status, creditworthiness, banking information, and trade history
Nuvo has raised $45 million to extend its B2B trade infrastructure into new verticals and deepen its reach in its core markets. Nuvo is building the infrastructure to transform how businesses connect, trade, and grow. By enabling companies to exchange verified profiles with potential partners, Nuvo provides instant access to critical trust signals, including verification status, creditworthiness, banking information, and trade history, allowing businesses to activate new partnerships quickly and confidently. With identity, connectivity, and trade data in one place, businesses can expand their customer and vendor networks more easily, scale faster with less risk, and unlock growth and resilience. The company’s infrastructure is used by more than 50,000 businesses to activate new partnerships with customers and vendors and manage their trade relationships. With the new funding, Nuvo will deepen its reach across core markets such as alcohol and beverage, building materials, chemicals, food service, distribution, and manufacturing, while extending into new verticals. As the network grows, modern payments infrastructure and AI systems will power the intelligent foundations needed to connect and coordinate trade between 50 million global businesses. “Continued innovation, growth and accessibility of goods in the global economy require a new kind of technology infrastructure, and that’s what we’re building at Nuvo,” Sid Malladi, co-founder and CEO of Nuvo, said.
Google CEO says Gemini could be added as a built-in option to iPhones this year
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company’s AI service, Gemini, could soon become part of Apple’s iPhone. Pichai said he is hopeful that Gemini will be added as a built-in option on Apple’s smartphone this year. Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, uses its own models for most AI tasks available on the company’s phones, tablets and computers. However, the company has partnered with ChatGPT from OpenAI for integration with its Siri voice assistant and Writing Tools, a feature for creating and editing text. Pichai said he hopes that Gemini, a ChatGPT rival, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products. He said he spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the topic last year and hopes to have a deal hammered out by mid-2025. Google is in the middle of its largest AI push yet. The company has integrated AI across its product lines, with 15 of its products each having more than half a billion users now using Gemini models. AI Overviews in search have reached 1.5 billion monthly users. “We continue to see that usage growth is increasing as people learn that search is more useful for more of their queries,” Pichai said adding that AI Mode queries tend to be twice as long as those in traditional search.
Google CEO says Gemini could be added as a built-in option to iPhones this year
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company’s AI service, Gemini, could soon become part of Apple’s iPhone. Pichai said he is hopeful that Gemini will be added as a built-in option on Apple’s smartphone this year. Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, uses its own models for most AI tasks available on the company’s phones, tablets and computers. However, the company has partnered with ChatGPT from OpenAI for integration with its Siri voice assistant and Writing Tools, a feature for creating and editing text. Pichai said he hopes that Gemini, a ChatGPT rival, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products. He said he spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the topic last year and hopes to have a deal hammered out by mid-2025. Google is in the middle of its largest AI push yet. The company has integrated AI across its product lines, with 15 of its products each having more than half a billion users now using Gemini models. AI Overviews in search have reached 1.5 billion monthly users. “We continue to see that usage growth is increasing as people learn that search is more useful for more of their queries,” Pichai said adding that AI Mode queries tend to be twice as long as those in traditional search.
Google Messages rolling out ‘Unsubscribe’ button to stop SMS and RCS spam
Google Messages is gaining a new “Unsubscribe” feature to combat spam and other unwanted SMS texts or RCS chats from business senders. “Unsubscribe” is for businesses that send “unwanted messages in Google Messages, like promotions and other non-essential content.” The new button can appear at the bottom of the chat (just above the text field) or in the conversation’s overflow menu. A sheet then slides up asking “Why are you unsubscribing?”: Not signed up, Too many messages, No longer interested, Spam, or Other. In the case of spam, there’s a “Report this sender” option. Behind-the-scenes, Google Messages sends “STOP” to the sender from your number. Afterwards, “you should no longer receive non-essential messages from that sender. Unsubscribe applies to: 1) RCS for Business messages in the United States, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom. 2) SMS or MMS messages in the United States from short codes (phone numbers with 5-6 digits) and alphanumeric senders.
Adyen sees growing demand for embedded finance offerings- . platforms net revenue reached €55.5 million, up 63% year over year
Adyen’s first quarter announcement provided ample evidence of embedded finance’s momentum as platforms and marketplaces seek to build payments into their own business models. Platforms net revenue reached €55.5 million, up 63% year over year, per the company’s financials, with significant demand in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment. Processed volumes were up 61% excluding the impact of eBay, to €314.8 billion. The number of platform business customers, stood at 177,000, up from 96,000 in the same time frame last year. Adyen also said that it has 30 platform customers that process more than €1 billion annually, up from 19 a year ago. Issuing volumes have increased, though management added that this part of the business is relatively small and will take time to grow. Within the digital pillar, net revenues surged 13% to €320.4 million, on the heels of demand in the content and subscriptions verticals. Unified Commerce — comprised of Adyen’s operations that connect online and offline payments for client firms’ cross-channel efforts — saw revenue growth of 31% to €158.8 million, with growth in the retail and the food and beverage segments. Processed volumes gained 37%, while 592 customers leveraged the Unified Commerce operations to process payments across multiple regions, up 77 customers year over year.
Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet- has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go
Amazon released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio). It is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding of context, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.” Nova Premier, which has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go, is weaker on certain benchmarks than flagship models from rival AI companies such as Google. In bright spots for Premier, the model does well on tests for knowledge retrieval and visual understanding, SimpleQA and MMMU, according to Amazon’s internal benchmarking. In Bedrock, Premier is priced at $2.50 per 1 million tokens fed into the model and $12.50 per 1 million tokens generated by the model. Importantly, Premier isn’t a “reasoning” model. As opposed to models like OpenAI’s o4-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, it can’t take additional time and computing to carefully consider and fact-check its answers to questions.
Bank workers coalition claims problematic human capital management practices that led to the fake account scandal may be making a comeback at Wells Fargo
Concerns have resurfaced about sales practices at Wells Fargo almost a decade after the bank was embroiled in a fake account scandal. According to a report by the Committee for Better Banks, a coalition representing frontline bank workers and unions, the pressure on staff to deliver sales goals has returned at the US bank.
The findings come after Wells Fargo was hit with a record fine by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2016 after employees had opened millions of unauthorised accounts for customers to meet aggressive internal sales targets. The scandal resulted in sweeping changes at the bank, which included the removal of product-based sales goals for retail staff. However, the report alleges that sales goals are being reintroduced under new terminology, such as “outcomes”, with scores on these metrics determining whether employees will receive raises, incentives or bonuses. The report finds that branch managers are also required to track “production outcomes”, such as new accounts opened and loan growth, with lower-volume branches flagged for possible closure. The report further states that employees at the bank say “outbound calling requirements”, once common during the scandal era to push sales, have returned. Staff performance, the report suggests, is being measured by the number of calls made to clients, the number of customer contacts made, and the number of appointments booked. These metrics, according to existing staff cited in the report, have become a formal part of performance evaluations, a shift that they view as a return to pre-scandal practices. “Wells Fargo workers are telling us loud and clear: the conditions that led to billions in fines and widespread consumer harm are returning,” said Nick Weiner, organising director at the Committee for Better Banks. When the CFPB issued its fine totalling $185mn in 2016, it said that thousands of employees at Wells Fargo may have opened more than 2mn deposit and credit card accounts across the country without customers’ permission. Richard Cordray, then director of the CFPB, said at the time that the penalty “should serve notice to the entire industry”.