Crypto exchange Coinbase has unveiled the x402 protocol to automate online payments with stablecoins, allowing direct transactions from holder to merchant without intermediaries. The protocol will be particularly useful for AI agents to pay for digital items automatically, but can serve any service requiring micropayments – essentially functioning as the online version of automated toll payments. Applications could include API usage, online content, flights, or computer resources. While designed for direct payments, various intermediaries will likely emerge to simplify the process for merchants. The key is that there is no need for an intermediary. The stablecoin payment goes directly from the holder to the merchant. That said, any number of intermediaries will pop up to make it easier for merchants. When browsing the web, if we come across a missing web page it often shows a 404 error. An error code that we never see is the 402 error, which says there’s a paywall and you need to make a payment. Coinbase is using this to build a protocol for payments to make it as seamless as sending a tweet. “We built x402 because the internet has always needed a native way to send and receive payments—and stablecoins finally make that possible,” said Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform. “Just like HTTPS secured the web, x402 could define the next era of the internet; one where value moves as freely and instantly as information. We’re laying the groundwork for an economy run not just by people, but by software—autonomous, intelligent, and always on.”
Ramp and Stripe expand partnership to enable businesses to fund a wallet using local currency or by depositing stablecoins directly with stablecoin-backed corporate cardss
Ramp will expand its issuing partnership with Stripe, a programmable financial services company, to launch the industry’s first stablecoin-backed corporate cards with fully integrated spend management software. Together, these companies are setting a new standard in global commerce by making cross-border transactions dramatically easier and faster. By working with Stripe to extend Ramp’s platform to previously unreachable markets, businesses in emerging economies will gain access to the same advanced financial tools that have helped over 30,000+ U.S. companies save billions of dollars and millions of hours. This combination of stablecoin-backed cards and Ramp’s powerful financial platform will accelerate business growth and commerce in regions that need it most. The integration enables issuance of new card programs in multiple countries at once, starting with select Latin American markets. Ramp and Stripe’s stablecoin-backed corporate cards offers businesses dramatically faster settlements, lower costs, built-in protection from currency volatility, and seamless card issuance — enabling global growth without global headaches: 1) Fund: Businesses can fund a wallet with Ramp using local currency, which is converted to stablecoin, or by depositing stablecoins directly. 2) Transact: Card purchases work as standard local payments. The cardholder simply pays in their local fiat currency, and the merchant receives fiat currency. 3) Protect: Funds are held in dollar-equivalent value, shielded against local currency devaluation. 4) Simplify: With Ramp’s corporate card, businesses can also access Ramp’s full suite of spend management and financial automation tools globally.
Perpay taps Marqeta to offer fully integrated digital-first cardholder experience from application to card issuance and spending, enabling instant issuance of virtual and tokenized cards
Marqeta has been selected by Perpay to power its Perpay Credit Card (issued by Celtic Bank), an unsecured credit card designed to help users build or improve their credit by automating payments directly from their paycheck. By linking paychecks, users can ensure automatic balance payments, staying on top of finances while strengthening their credit. Deploying Marqeta’s platform enables Perpay to scale its credit card services while maintaining control over the user experience, gaining customer insights, and leveraging modern credit capabilities. Marqeta’s all-in-one credit system lets Perpay deliver a fully integrated digital-first cardholder experience that aligns with its brand, enhancing engagement and loyalty. Perpay can unify and customize every touchpoint—from application to card issuance and spending—allowing instant issuance of virtual and tokenized cards. It can also access real-time cardholder data and spending controls, offering valuable insights to help users manage finances efficiently. Additionally, Marqeta’s flexible rewards engine allows Perpay to personalize rewards based on individual spending data. This enhances its offerings, helping users earn more to spend within Perpay’s marketplace, keeping customers engaged while reinforcing financial stability. Let me know if you’d like any refinements!
Form3’s account-to-account payments platform uses a multi-cloud architecture and a single code base to deliver zero-downtime payment processing solution via a single API
Form3, the cloud-native account-to-account payments platform, announced it is the only provider in live production delivering zero-downtime payment processing via a true multi-cloud architecture and a single code base. The platform currently processes over £4 billion in annual transaction volume for tier one banks including Mastercard, Nationwide, Lloyds, and Barclays. Form3’s platform recently proved its resilience when a cloud provider experienced a 40-minute outage—without any interruption to service or dropped payments. The platform’s ability to seamlessly switch between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure ensures continuous availability and fault tolerance. This is critical in financial services, where even brief downtime can result in financial loss, regulatory exposure, and reputational damage. In addition to its multi-cloud strategy, Form3’s single code base ensures consistent, secure, and efficient software delivery for all customers. This unified architecture allows for universal deployment of updates, patches, and new features without the delays and risks associated with fragmented codebases. “Our platform offers banks and financial institutions a truly resilient, zero-downtime solution that’s secure, compliant, and scalable. With a single API and unmatched reliability, our customers can focus on expanding their reach and services without worrying about outage.”
FCTI partners NCR Atleos to enable surcharge-free cash withdrawals and cash deposits at over 4,000 7-Eleven stores across the US for its issuer members and their cardholders through the Allpoint Network
NCR Atleos has partnered with FCTI, a trusted provider and partner to 7-Eleven, to bring Atleos’ Allpoint Network to more than 4,000 7-Eleven stores across the United States providing expanded, more convenient access to everyday banking transactions for its issuer members and their cardholders. By enabling Atleos’ Allpoint Network surcharge-free cash withdrawals and cash deposits at thousands of 7-Eleven stores, FCTI is fulfilling on its “ATM as a Destination” strategy aligning their services with the tools to grow consumer foot traffic at 7-Eleven’s stores. Additionally, Allpoint member issuers will continue their long-held access at over 3,000 Speedway branded store locations. “Growing foot traffic through the enhanced features and capabilities of our networked ATMs is core to FCTI’s mission,” said Masanori Sakaguchi, CEO of FCTI. “Implementing Allpoint aligns with our strategy and commitment to power the success of FCTI’s partners.” “Utility banking solutions are growing globally,” said Stuart Mackinnon, EVP & COO for Atleos. “Aligning with an established operator in FCTI presents Atleos and the Allpoint issuers we serve with significantly more endpoints to complete cash in and out transactions.”
Etsy blends human-recommended listings with ML and LLMs to expand the listings 20X and create an aesthetically cohesive collection that represents product variety and meets quality standards
Etsy is doubling down on a hybrid approach to artificial intelligence that keeps humans in the loop and ensures shoppers find what they want. The company is pursuing a strategy it calls “algotorial curation,” which blends recommendations by Etsy’s staff with advanced machine learning algorithms to scale curation across its inventory, Chief Product Officer Nick Daniel said. The process starts with human experts identifying trends and selecting listings that are examples of these trends. “After a collection is identified, our engineers use machine learning to expand it from roughly 50 human-curated listings to about 1,000. Finally, we use LLMs to make sure the full collection is aesthetically cohesive, represents a variety of products and meets our standards for quality.” The company uses Google’s Gemini multimodal model to power these experiences. Despite advances in generative AI, Etsy isn’t looking to eliminate humans from the equation. Instead, the company sees AI as a way to enhance human insight at scale, Daniel said. “Rather than removing human expertise from our merchandising work as AI becomes more powerful, we’re leveraging these tools to amplify the expertise of our team and create a more personalized experience. We’re putting human touch — from our buyers to our teams of employees to our sellers — at the center of shopping on Etsy. Because each item on Etsy is listed individually by a real seller, the data we have isn’t uniform — we’re not like a traditional eCommerce marketplace with a catalog or SKUs. AI can help us bridge this gap. We’re leveraging LLMs to extract key product details, like size and color, from listings, which improves search and helps connect the right items to the right buyers,” Daniel said. This strategy has yielded measurable results, boosting visibility and sales. “We used LLMs to generate alt text for listings that didn’t already have it and saw a nearly 5% increase in SEO visits and a nearly 3% increase in conversions to sales attributed to those visits,” he said.
Shopify’s first-quarter revenue surges 27% aided by the rapid checkout feature, Shop Pay’s 57% YoY growth processing $22 billion in GMV and by 64% penetration for Shopify Payments
Shopify’s first-quarter earnings results showed double-digit growth in gross merchandise volumes (GMV) and a continued movement toward streamlined checkout online and further inroads made in offline commerce. revenues were up 27% to $2.4 billion; GMV surged 22% to $74.8 billion. Offline GMV increased 23% and B2B GMV delivered triple-digit growth, up 109% from the year-ago first quarter, said President Harley Finkelstein. With a nod to the current fluid state of tariffs, Finkelstein pointed out that the company’s managed markets products give U.S. merchants “more options with our merchant of record service for collecting and remitting duties and taxes while managing other markets independently. This means if new duties are announced, most merchants can achieve compliance within hours. Later this month, we’ll introduce duty inclusive pricing, allowing merchants to set international prices that include duties in the product price. This ensures transparent pricing from the start and helps customers avoid surprise fees at checkout,” Finkelstein said. “Shopify Payments continues to be our largest product offering and a key driver. We made great progress in Q1, with payments GMV penetration hitting 64%,” Finkelstein said, as Shopify Payments expanded into new markets in Europe. Shop Pay, the rapid checkout feature, saw 57% growth year on year, processing $22 billion in GMV in the quarter. The Shop App continued its momentum in Q1, hitting over 94% year-over year growth in what Finkelstein termed “native GMV, an impressive acceleration and 84% growth last quarter.” Additionally, merchants are using Sidekick, the platform’s AI powered assistant, in increasing numbers, he said. The company expects current quarter revenues to grow in the mid 20% range year over year. As lower margin payment products are part of the mix, he said, gross dollar profit growth will come in at a rate lower than revenues; non-cash charges will also factor into margin impact.
FICO’s new Marketplace to connect enterprises to providers of data, AI/ML models, optimization tools and decision rulesets and cut the time required to access, validate and integrate new data sources
FICO has introduced a digital hub designed to connect organizations with data and analytics providers. This innovative new Marketplace offers easy access to data, artificial intelligence (AI) models, optimization tools, decision rulesets, and machine learning models, which deliver enterprise business outcomes from AI. With FICO Marketplace, FICO® Platform users can fast-track their journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise, because they will be able to: Unlock Value from Data Faster: by experimenting with new data sources and decision assets to determine predictive power and business value. Users can expect to cut the time required to access, validate and integrate new data sources by half. Leverage Decision Agents Across Multiple Use Cases, Improving Collaboration: with its open API architecture, it allows for any decision asset, data service, analytics model, software agent or third-party solution to address a wide range of use cases including customer management, fraud, originations, and marketing. The reusability of decision agents across multiple departments breaks down silos and improves collaboration. Drive Better Customer Experiences: by enabling a holistic view of each individual customer, as well as building innovative new intelligent solutions and analytic capabilities that come from industry collaboration. “FICO Marketplace will facilitate the type of collaboration across the industry that drives the next generation of intelligent solutions,” said Nikhil Behl, president, Software, FICO.
Startup Rove’s loyalty program allows users to earn airline miles without credit cards by shopping using the Google Chrome extension through affiliate marketing with over 7,000 merchants
Startup Rove claims to be the first universal mile loyalty program. Rove’s loyalty program allows airlines to expand the lucrative business of miles to millions more consumers, Co founder Max Morganroth said. But instead of allowing airlines to share fees with credit cards, Rove gives them a way to make money through affiliate marketing with over 7,000 merchants through the Rove shopping extension for Google Chrome. That’s a business model that’s similar to Honey and Rakuten. Morganroth explained that the points earned from shopping can be converted into airline miles, which hold more value than their equivalent in cash. In addition to the affiliate marketing scheme, Rove also offers its users miles for hotel bookings. Users can combine Rove miles earned on hotel bookings with miles from the shopping extension and even credit card miles if they have a card that earns airline points. The startup’s elaborate scheme may seem complicated, but Morganroth says that earning miles through Rove is straightforward, as long as users book hotels on its platform or shop using the Rove shopping extension. When users are ready to book flights with their miles, Rove’s travel portal helps them find the best award flight deals. The startup’s users can book award travel on about 140 carriers because it is often possible to transfer miles of one airline company to its affiliates in another region. “Gen Z wants to travel more than any other demographic, yet they have the least access to the tools like this that actually make it cheaper,” he said. “They no longer have to wait until they’re 28, have five years of credit history, and $700 fee to get one of these cards; they can just download a Chrome extension, book any of their existing travel through us, and they’ll immediately be in the game.”
Barracuda Networks’s multimodal AI simultaneously correlates and analyzes diverse text and visual data types including URLs, documents, images, QR codes and more to offer more adaptive defense against zero-day attacks
Barracuda Networks unveiled new threat detection capabilities fueled by multimodal AI that deliver context-aware protection against emerging attacks. The new capabilities give Barracuda’s platform the ability to protect against attacks with accuracy and speed by simultaneously correlating and analyzing diverse text and visual data types – including URLs, documents, images, QR codes and more. The new capabilities introduce a new integration with multimodal AI, technology that synthesizes and interprets numerous data streams in various formats, with ML classifiers and a purpose-built sandbox engine. Doing so delivers a faster, smarter and more adaptive defense layer that detects more than three times as many malicious files at eight times the speed of previous models. The capabilities significantly strengthen Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection, which provides layered security across the Barracuda platform. The new capabilities also enhance Barracuda LinkProtect, which inspects URLs for hidden threats, malicious scripts, suspicious redirects and other attacks using a virtual sandbox and secure, isolated browser environment. By incorporating multimodal AI, Barracuda can now detect not only known threat signatures but also subtle anomalies across multiple content formats that may indicate novel or zero-day attacks. The capability is particularly useful at a time when threat actors continue to blend social engineering, image-based lures and malicious links into more convincing and evasive campaigns.