PayPal’s Plan to Win the Agent Economy

Sy Taylor  0:00  

Simon, welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets, and, of course, agentic commerce. In this agentic commerce series. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author at FinTech brain food and head of market dev at tempo and back in orogenic commerce. Hot Seat is the one and only CEO and founder of mesh vamos easy. How the heck are you? Sir?

Bam Azizi  0:36  

Thank you, Simon. Excited for this episode.

Sy Taylor  0:39  

Yeah. Gonna be a heck of an episode. Joining us today is cosik Raj Gopal, who is EVP of strategy and corp dev and partnerships over at PayPal. How you doing? Cosik,

Speaker 1  0:50  

excellent. Thanks for having

Sy Taylor  0:52  

me. I'm excited to have you. We did a had a fun panel at the BGS invent back in February in SF. I enjoyed that one a lot, and I invited you to the show and excited for the audience to hear from you today before we do get into your conversation, I do want to remind viewers and listeners that views and opinions of our contributors today may be their own and might not reflect those companies they represent. And the most important part, please don't take anything we say is tax, legal or financial advice, do your own research and stay safe. This is for informational purposes only. And with all of that said, Kosik, give me a 30,000 foot view. I hear a lot of people saying agentic commerce. Some of them, I think, know what they're talking about, at least think they know what they're talking about. Well, what does it mean to you? What does it mean to PayPal when you hear the term agentic commerce?

Speaker 1  1:45  

Yeah, it's a great question, and the way I describe it is that agentic commerce is commerce where agents engage with purchase or provision products and services on behalf of consumers and merchants. So there's a couple of things embedded in that definition. One is it is about consumers, but it's also about merchants on the other side, and at PayPal, we think quite extensively about that, because PayPal launched and grew successful with the dawn of E commerce, and that just had consumers engaging with merchants, and PayPal intermediated not just commerce, but importantly also risk and Fraud Management in the early days of commerce and all of the associated complexities that come with that, chargebacks, et cetera. And in many ways, I think agentic commerce, by injecting agents into that consumer merchant connection creates an opportunity for PayPal to renew and reinvent itself, building on the strong foundation of trust that we had starting from the dawn of E commerce across consumers and merchants. So last year, we announced agentic commerce services, which is a suite of solutions that allow both merchants and consumers to engage with agentic commerce. And there are a few capabilities that we have that we think are quite compelling for agentic commerce, which I'd start with, trusted payments infrastructure dating back to the dawn of E commerce, identity verification and Buyer Protection, and we don't know yet. Just to be clear, how big agentic commerce is going to be, we think it's going to be significant. Perhaps more importantly, we don't know how quickly it's going to ramp. There is a lot of thinking across the ecosystem on is this going to be 5% of digital commerce in three years? Is it going to be 20% of digital commerce in five years. But whatever it ends up being, what we believe strongly is that it will require new solutions to new problems, or evolving problems for consumers and merchants to engage with each other in a trusted fashion, and that is not going to change, right? You may have agents buying from merchants, you may have agents buying from agents of merchants. You may have consumers buying from agents. There's all kinds of flows that are possible, but ultimately there is a trust equation between the purchaser and the entity that's selling, and we believe that the solutions for agentic commerce need to address and reinforce that trust.

Sy Taylor  4:21  

I love that definition, sort of any transaction that is engaging with consuming from or some sort of provision of products or services where there's an agent on either side, on the consumer side or the merchant side. The merchant side of this conversation often gets lost out when we think agentic commerce, like the main story is often like the bucking your travel example. People think about, oh, the personal shopper example. They think about the consumer experience. They don't think about the OTA or the stores kind of experience of that and the trust piece in the middle, that's really, really key. I know, bam. Trust is something that. Is key to a lot of what you do in the network you're building. How are you thinking about everything that coal suit was talking about there?

Bam Azizi  5:08  

Yeah, I think it's like the transaction, any transaction online, requires some sort of a trust between these two entities. I think that's why we need companies like PayPal to be able to make sure that the service is being delivered the money also the fund will be delivered to the company that, or anti is selling the goods. But when it comes to agentic commerce, things gets a little bit more complicated. I have one prediction, that the number of fraud, as you're seeing today, is going to decrease dramatically because of agentic we'll have new type of frauds happening. So I'm sure like companies like PayPal or stripe, that they're in the forefront of this, will start seeing new trends, and they're the best companies to kind of build for the age of agent e commerce.

Sy Taylor  5:51  

Yeah, on that cause. What did you see last Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Because there were some interesting data points I saw from the market of a lot more customer research, right at the top of the funnel, the LLM is the start of the purchase journey. Are you seeing that? And where is the sort of agentic in the journey? And where is it not? Frankly,

Speaker 1  6:15  

yeah, for sure. And if we go back to mobile, like the dawn of mobile, I think we'll all remember initially, that was where consumer research started, right? It's not where commerce started. But, you know, once we all got these really powerful smartphones, these computers in our hands, it wasn't like commerce was ready to go mobile on day zero. It took a little bit of time, right? In fact, it took a few years. But what was potentially immediately available was the ability for consumers to do their own research, to engage, you know, initially with search and and then eventually with merchant specific interfaces, like merchant websites and apps on what was the right product for their needs, for what they were looking for. And we think something very similar is going to happen, and in fact, is already happening, and strategically for us, it made us ask the question, no matter how agentic commerce evolves, whether it's agents buying on behalf of consumers or consumers engaging with merchant agents, what is going to be true? Right? What can we say is going to be true no matter what. Obviously, we've talked about the most important foundational piece of that already, as BAM said, which is trust. But the other piece is we believe that from a merchant perspective, on your question, no matter what happens, it will be important for merchants to be able to make their product and services data discoverable across AI channels, right? And for them to have the ability to seamlessly drop orders to existing fulfillment and management systems. So we think it's highly unlikely that any merchant is going to say, I only want to be with a single AI platform. Yeah, I think they're going to be able to want to say, I want any LL, any AI, agent, perplexity, chat, GPT, Claude, whatever it may be. I want to be able to engage with any of them, and then eventually I want to be able to have my products and services discoverable across them, right for maximum reach. Yeah, I don't

Sy Taylor  8:18  

want to just discoverable in one of them. I don't want to use a specific interface or a specific technology to speak to each individual one of them. I want to almost like be discoverable to all of them. And that works today on the internet with Google and a lot of the search engines and that sort of stuff. So why wouldn't it work over here? And that's not necessarily the case with the with the llms Today, we're still trying to figure out how all of that fits together, I guess,

Speaker 1  8:43  

yeah. And in general, we know from the history of commerce that broader beats narrower and that open beats closed, right? I think we're all familiar with the journey of open loop cards versus private label cards, and how that evolved and ultimately, for merchants and consumers, ubiquity is incredibly important in commerce, right? And particularly if, as a merchant, I have an online or a mobile storefront, I want discovery to be as ubiquitous as possible. And so that's why we launched store sync, which is a capability that does exactly that, to make merchants product data discoverable across AI channels, and to be able to drop orders to their fulfillment and management systems. It's also why we announced the acquisition of Symbio, which is a company that we had invested in from a PayPal venture standpoint, that has that capability, because we think that no matter how agentic commerce evolves, that will be a capability that will matter for merchants. And so I think if we stepped back and said, What is going to remain true, trust will remain important, the ability for merchants to be broadly discovered will remain important. The ability for consumers to shop across surfaces seamlessly in. No matter which LLM or agent front door they go through will remain important. Then you begin, as I think we're doing, to build for an agent LLM, platform agnostic world, putting the interests of the merchants, of the consumers, front and center, and saying for that equation what needs to be true. Obviously, interoperability across protocols is critical for that as well, but that's how we're thinking about

Sy Taylor  10:28  

it. Yeah, we'll come to protocols in the second half of the show. But I think that customer experience is so key. And bam, you've got some experience of like building networks on both sides of these things. Have you made any the agentic commerce purchases yet? Or have you bought anything earlier on and found any products online in agentic commerce and and how do you think about that from a merchant's perspective?

Bam Azizi  10:49  

I think from merchant, PayPal is doing a great job in terms of managing everything so merchants can offer a better service to agents. I was more curious to ask kausik about the experience on the user, sorry on the agent side, say, if I'm an agent and I want to buy something online and I find like, the right product for my human what would I use, typically, to pay? Do you pay with crypto? Do I use, like, a granted Visa card? Am I using PayPal or PSP, or I'm just paying directly to them, to the merchant. How does that part of the equation evolving? As of now,

Speaker 1  11:28  

it's early days, but I would hypothesize that it will evolve similar to the agnosticity, if that's a word that I was describing with regard to AI engagement for consumers, that if I were an agent, and ultimately, I'm either operating on behalf of a consumer, or in the case of B to B payments, I'm operating on behalf of an enterprise, and I would expect that over time, that agent would have the full range of payment options available. Now, you and I have talked about stable coin applications before, for B to B payments and cross border use cases. I think stable coin could be highly relevant, right? And I think agents could have that as part of their payment suite, but over time, I would expect that agents would be able to transact with funding instruments or payment instruments, in the way that consumers are able to transact today, and have the full suite of those available to them now, there may be particular ecosystems where there is some sort of default, right? So you might have a B to B cross border payment transaction, where perhaps there is a vendor payment that's being made by an enterprise or a middle market business, and they may have preferences for how they want to be paid in terms of or how to pay in terms of trust, in terms of auditability and verification and so forth. But for the most part, I'd expect over time, that the full range of payment instruments that you see available as options for consumers to pay today will also become available for agents,

Sy Taylor  13:03  

but

Bam Azizi  13:03  

consumers, they're picking based on trust, based on their basically how comfortable this option is. I pick PayPal because it's easier. I already have an account. My credit card is linked. When it comes to agents, they probably go after cheapest, faster option, right? They optimize them because they don't care, like, how many clicks it takes for them to do the payment. Do you think there would be a difference between how a user picks and how the agent picks?

Speaker 1  13:29  

Yeah, I think it depends on, ultimately, who's controlling the agent, or whether an agent has a mind of its own right. So if it's an agent transacting on behalf of a consumer, certainly in markets, for example, where rewards currencies make a big difference. The consumer may want to have a preference for what payment mode they use with the agent. Now at PayPal, we like the fact that, as you said, we're a trusted provider. The account is pre enrolled, and we carry the full range of funding instruments, right? So if you have, for example, a particular example, a particular card that you're ordering from a restaurant or from DoorDash, you still get those rewards by transacting within the PayPal wallet, in addition to getting the trust benefit that you and I talked about. And so I think as long as there is consumer, or, I should say, user, to be more agnostic of whether it's a consumer or an enterprise or a small business, defining the parameters for how an agent might choose, I think that could be the likely path of this right, because, remember, from a consumer perspective, in general, the consumer isn't optimizing for cost of payment, right? An enterprise, maybe, particularly if you're making a B to B payment, and there are other factors that may play into as well, but a consumer may be optimizing for rewards or cash back or something else like that, depending on the category of purchase.

Sy Taylor  14:55  

Can you talk a little bit about the work you did on copilot and inst? Buy and everything you've done with perplexity and kind of what you learned from that experience? Because I think perplexity is interesting in that they're pioneering a lot of stuff. Some of it's sticking, some of it's not, but they're always trying something new and trying to develop new user experiences. What did you do and what did you learn from the experience?

Speaker 1  15:19  

Yeah, it's a great question. So in both cases, we developed an integration. The Microsoft copilot integration was announced in January, and at the heart of it, it's exactly about where I started, right about enabling convenient agent tech commerce. So in the Microsoft case, we supported the launch of copilot checkout in copilot, and the idea is to enable shoppers consumers to engage and pay without ever leaving the copilot experience. So again, if we go back to the days of the early mobile web, this is avoiding the splash page experience, right? I'm on the website and I click on something to buy, and voila, I come to a whole different page with a different look and feel, and this is where I need to consummate the transaction and check out. So the idea here is to learn from that and say, instead of like having consumers suffer through that, as I think the whole industry did for a little while, let's modernize agentic commerce and enable discovery, engagement, purchase and payment within that experience. Now, all of it isn't live and at scale today, but we think that that's the end game. And the idea here, in particular, with Microsoft on copilot was to combine their intelligent discovery with our trusted capabilities on payments and commerce to create this kind of end to end experience for the consumer and to enable merchant product catalogs using store sync, right? So part of the Microsoft integration is also store sync, which I talked about, and then perplexity, very similar, right? So we announced with perplexity in November last year that we're enabling PayPal merchants to be discoverable within the perplexity experience, giving consumers the ability to check out in chat. And so from a consumer perspective, you go from that research, as you were saying, Simon, where consumers may start today, like, let me find out more about what kind of sneakers I want to buy, right? Let me engage with the agent on different parameters, cost, comfort, fit, but do that in the agent and then transact within that as well. So we started with several merchants, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Ashley Furniture, new AG, et cetera, and we'll learn from this, right like because it's early days with consumers engaging on it, we wanted to do the integration in time for the holiday season and empower both merchants and consumers to have that discoverability and that end to end engagement within the app. Now, if we step back and think about the consumer journey right over time, you could imagine different journeys for different categories of purchases, and I think this is going to be at the heart of evolution of agentic commerce. If I were to analogize this to, I don't know what a good analogy is, maybe an airport, right? You might have different boarding gates for a regional jet, for a domestic flight, for an international flight. As a consumer, you might pass through different security checks. You might have different protocols. You might have different documentation requirements. So you could imagine, if a consumer is buying, let's take three categories as an example, a recurring purchase. So if I as a consumer am replenishing groceries or I'm replenishing toothpaste, that may be a fairly easy transaction, right? So today, if you're in the Starbucks or Pete's coffee app, you can just reorder, right? You don't need to type in all the details again, you know, it's a replenishment purchase. This is my usual. I get it every Monday. I'm going to get it every Monday. A second category might be what I would describe as higher ticket discretionary purchases where questions of appetite and taste matter. So this could be fashion. It could be jewelry. By the way, high end fashion, I think, is a great example of a category where tokenized commerce, I think, will become more and more relevant over time, because it's a category where the digital representation and ownership and provenance matter. And if you take that category, you could imagine that discoverability within an AI experience within an app, like a perplexity or a copilot or a chat GPT really matters, right? Like, what does that discoverability look like if I'm a consumer? How visual is it? Would the app, for example, if I'm buying something to wear? Take a digital twin representation of myself and show me how the jeans or the jacket look, how I look in with that purchase on I think all of that richness that we might associate with a showroom or with web based representations in digital commerce, I think are going to come to agentic experiences, and I think they're going to be super exciting and rich for discretionary purchases that consumers make. A third category, which I'm personally very interested in, to see how it evolves, is travel and hospitality. So travel and hospitality, if you take the two together, are the largest single category for E commerce. They represent more than a third of E commerce. They are high ticket. They're often discretionary. They matter a great deal for the consumer experience. And this is a category where I like to remind people there literally were agents 50

Sy Taylor  21:00  

years ago

Speaker 1  21:00  

or 30 years ago.

Sy Taylor  21:02  

It's the perfect use case for agents. We just make people click a lot of buttons. Yeah,

Speaker 1  21:07  

that's right. So it's like Back to the Future, except calling a travel agent in a physical office. I'm engaging on whatever the device might be, with an AI agent that's helping me consummate my, you know, my family holiday. And the reason, I think this is a super interesting category for agentic commerce is that it's not just one purchase, it's multiple purchases. It may not just be one consumer purchasing, it may be multiple consumers, right? So an agent may have memory about the preferences and appetites of a family, right? So if you take me like my wife, likes to go to Italy, I like to go to Asia. There are certain months when I prefer to travel to Asia. I don't want to be in Italy in the in the peak of the summer, all of those preferences you could imagine over time could be ingested by and applied by an agent for a consumer, or some collection of consumers, and you could have social purchasing within an agentic context, but before the purchase is actually consummated, you might actually have a fair bit of back and forth with a merchant or merchants or merchant agents. So you might say, I want to book this airline ticket, but with these parameters, this is how I trade off cost versus being there at my destination on the weekend, for example. So it's a very interesting, high ticket, Pivotal and multi parameter purchase experience. And my hypothesis is that the moment it's nailed is going to be a real inflection point for agent and commerce. Because if I can make my travel and hotel bookings via an agent, and I can do that the way I do today. However, I might do that today, right? Online, mobile, or maybe for corporate travel through an agent. The moment that happens. This is real at scale, right? And it's not just for a niche category, like, I'm replenishing toilet paper, which is a low ticket purchase.

Sy Taylor  23:17  

No, it's a third of E commerce. Like, that's it's a very powerful thesis, because essentially, you're saying this is the biggest category of spend. If I can make that spend experience different, then the payment will naturally be different as a nice result. And it's such a powerful thesis, because I think people are assuming that it's like the classic shopping for an individual item thing, but you've kind of really zeroed in on something there where we had agents like, it's kind of really clean. I do have to pause us here while we briefly thank our sponsors, and I'll bring us back in and we'll hear a little bit more about that thesis in just a second. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform vtap uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is brought to you by mesh, the first global crypto payments network. It connects over 300 wallets, exchanges and payments platforms. Mesh enables anyone to pay and get paid instantly, anywhere in any asset. Mesh makes digital transactions seamless, secure and universal, fueling the next era of agentic commerce. Learn more at. Mesh, pay.com, forward slash. Ai, thank you so much to our sponsors, cos you were just talking about those categories and where they're evolving. Bam, your thoughts on the categories that have the potential. Here is you resonating with what kosick saying? Yeah, 100%

Bam Azizi  25:17  

I think travel is the easiest one also is the hardest one. The one that's hard for end users is going to be the easiest one for the agent to come in, and any of us can go and click here and there, but like knowing all the preferences, what cabin you want to fly, what airline you prefer, what dates you prefer, like especially for a family trip that you have to go through like punching in all the names, first name, last name, passport numbers to just book a one simple flight. An agent can do better and can make your life easier. Also, when it comes to shopping, people tend to ask their hardest questions from the agents. If you're doing a recurring like Door Dash purchase, probably you want to do that yourself, because it's easy. Won't click repay versus if you want to buy something new, or you want to buy a gift for your dog, you don't know what to buy, just go and search like, what's the best birthday gift for a dog? The agent would figure that out for you. I would bet on luxury items. Travels. A lot of digital services will come to agents. Also, another prediction that they have is agent to agent transactions that typically users are not included. Everything happens behind the scene. For instance, you want to read one page of Wall Street Journal, you have to pay a penny. There is another agent that basically has done that. So just pay that, like, half a cent or two cents to that agent to parse that website for you. So those are the type of things that agent e commerce can really add a ton of value for both end users and also for the merchants.

Speaker 1  26:54  

You know, it's a great point bem to highlight micro transactions like you did, right? Because I think again, with with E commerce and mobile commerce, there have been lots of hypotheses on micro transactions might just be operated fundamentally differently, and I think it's quite possible that with the advent of AI agents, that finally becomes a reality. So instead of the bundled purchasing subscription for a newspaper, I can finally buy, you know, just an article, and have that be an agent to agent transaction. And like I said earlier, I think we're going to see lots of agent to agent engagement in the B to B space.

Bam Azizi  27:31  

And more importantly, that is where stable coin will shine. Like, how can you pay half a cent to another? Like, real time, you cannot use Visa or MasterCard or wire. So that's where stable coin is going to be the key component to enable that too.

Speaker 1  27:46  

Yeah, and maybe we can have transactions that clear and settle on a Saturday afternoon,

Bam Azizi  27:50  

yep,

Speaker 1  27:50  

even if they're cross border, right?

Sy Taylor  27:52  

Unpack that cross section for people that don't understand clearing and settlement quite as well as a veteran like yourself, because I think p y USD is particularly interesting here PayPal. USD, this is a stable coin. But of course, if a consumer or a business has swiped a card, they think the payment has happened, but clearing and settlement is this whole other thing that merchants feel the pain of in a whole bunch of ways. So can you just talk about how stable coins uplift that and why that might be important for agent to agent to agent payments as well.

Speaker 1  28:22  

Sure, at the simplest level, the way I describe it is a payment transaction has four components, authentication, authorization, clearing and settlement. And Simon, I think what you're describing for 99% of consumers, the experience is I've been authenticated like this is who I am, and I've authorized the transaction, and the transaction is done. And I think the genius of the system, the card network system, for example, or frankly, any payment system, is to provide that level of trust and certainty to consumers that if they're authenticated and authorized, the transaction has gone through. But ultimately, as we know, the transaction really only quote, unquote, goes through if it's cleared and settled, and ultimately, any payment is a liability on someone's balance sheet. And the holders of all balance sheets are banks, so banks are generally not open on Saturdays and Sundays. And this was the thrust of my comment to bam, just now that you could clear and settle on a Saturday, if you can, with stable coins tied to a blockchain. So pyusd, as you said, is our stable coin. It's built on the Ethereum protocol. There's many stable coins, but what they all have in common is if you are ultimately clearing and settling to a ledger, and that ledger never sleeps. It doesn't close at 4pm on Friday and reopen at 9am on Monday, if you are a merchant or if you're a business, and particularly if it's a cross border transaction where there is a time difference, that time difference matters for the availability of funds. So with stable coin, you can clear and settle even when the bank is closed, right? And the potential for that, for commerce, for accelerating efficiency, for making it easier for not just consumers and merchants, which is the language I've been using, but fundamentally counterparties, whether that Counterparty is a consumer or a business or a vendor or a bank, the ease that stable coins ultimately provide, particularly for cross border transactions, I think, will be pretty significant and reshape flows, particularly in B to B payments, where businesses will vote with their feet on efficient clearing and settlement and availability of clearing and settlement over

Sy Taylor  30:43  

time? Yeah, no, it's fascinating because we've talked a lot about consumers and agents making purchases. We talked a little bit about B to B, and then we've talked about agent to agent. All of these flows use different payments rails today, and they happen domestically, and they happen cross borders. But the ones that don't happen a lot are the cross border ones where they're few and far between. So the plumbing behind the scenes is typically slow, and it doesn't have to be fast. But as the global south is coming into the economy, everybody wants chat, GPT, everybody wants Netflix, everybody wants AWS. Everybody wants to be a global citizen. If agents are going to be selling products, then surely they need to be able to move at the same speed. And they have the classic inventory management problem that a merchant always did, which is I need to get paid before I can buy more inventory, before I can sell more things. And if I'm not getting paid for 30 days, then I need to figure out how the heck I'm going to go buy more inventory agents? Inventory is tokens, and tokens, if you haven't seen a very, very expensive so where can they go get more tokens from if they haven't been paid? And I think that's going to really accelerate in a really interesting way. I'm curious as to the alphabet soup of protocols. You mentioned that at the beginning of the show there's AP two, ACP, UCP x4, two, MPP, like, I don't know if we should be making a rap song here, or if we should be making help me understand this space, and help me understand it as PayPal is thinking about it, because the Internet has a lot of protocols, but they all sort of fit together and they work. Will we get there? What's the path forward? Are we still finding our feet? Is it still early? Is this the WAP era? Like, what are your thoughts?

Speaker 1  32:33  

Yeah, it's a great question. So my sense is that it's an exciting time, because the launch of all these protocols suggests that meaningful, large players at scale, which include us, believe that there's something real here, even though we're not yet at the stage where you're getting market share reporting on agentic commerce, it's still very small, but the protocols are a good leading indicator that large players in the payments and fintech space. Expect this to be significant. So you mentioned ACP, and ACP is the open AI stripe protocol. You've got the ADA protocol launched by Google in April of last year, which allows back to van's point about agent to agent AI agents to discover and delegate tasks across platforms. And there are several other protocols, and there may be more. But what I will say which is helpful to step back and think about what really matters here is interoperability across protocols, right? Because all these protocols are going to exist and engage in different ecosystems. Importantly, they may exist and engage with different counterparties. So there may be protocol for agent to agent. There may be protocol for a consumer delegated agent to a merchant, or a consumer delegated agent to a merchant, delegated agent. And I think if you are a merchant and you're navigating these protocols, hopefully consumers will not have to if you're a merchant navigating these protocols, I think your best port of call is your payment service provider or PSP. So that's audien, that's stripe, that's Braintree at PayPal, and there's our ppcp, PSP as well. And the PSP actually should, over time, view this as an essential part of their job, in the same way that PSPs today create for merchants of all sizes, the payments dial tone, right? I'm bringing to you a stack of all the acceptance funding instruments as a merchant that you need to launch your business as part of that, initially, I suspect it'll be as a value added service, and I think over time, it'll be standard as part of that, I'm going to bring the interoperability across these protocols so there is a trusted layer of engagement as a merchant for you to plug into, and you don't even need to worry as a merchant about what protocol needs to be called into use for this particular transaction.

Sy Taylor  34:57  

That all gets hidden from you. And I think. That's kind of what, again, has happened with the Internet. Like I plug into my ISP, my laptop just kind of works. I'm not thinking about the MPEG codec when I'm using Netflix, necessarily, and I'm not thinking about all of the things that AWS had to build. And I think this is the role of good service providers. Bam, what are your thoughts on the protocol soup, and how are you thinking about it, given the role of like mesh, trying to tie a lot of these, these things together?

Bam Azizi  35:27  

Yeah, as much as mesh, we love fragmentation, I think this is the only place that will see some consolidation. I think there would be one or two protocols that will win this game. And I think so far, every single protocol is trying to kind of offer this for free. There is no monetization behind the scene. It's just everyone is kind of trying to build something for the agenda commerce era. I believe it's needed, but I think one or two protocol will be adopted massively by different companies and different vendors, and they become the golden standard, similar to HTTP. So we had many different protocols in the Internet era and mobile came in. We had many different OSs like Symbian and others. Now we have just iOS and Android. I think that we would see the same sort of consolidation for agent e commerce protocols.

Speaker 1  36:16  

I think that's exactly right, and the history of payments reinforces that, right? There aren't 20 open loop card networks at scale. There's Visa, MasterCard, China, union, pay, maybe a few others. Ultimately, payments is a business with high inertia and high network effects, so the usage, whatever the counterparties may be, and the convenience cost and other things related to the protocols will lead to, I think, quite naturally in the marketplace, a handful of protocols that ultimately become standards. Now the PSP, to my earlier point, can help you navigate that period before the standards become sort of set in stone. But ultimately, to bam's point, I expect there is an end game with a number of protocols that you can count on the fingers of

Sy Taylor  37:02  

one hand, yeah. And I think agents are going to need PSPs, who can help with some of that too. And they're going to need markdown, and they're going to need a really clean robot, dot txt, and agents dot txt. And I think serving them as a new customer is going to be super fascinating journey. This has been a phenomenal conversation. We're going to have to bring you back, because this space moves so quickly, I mean, and since the time I saw you in February, there's been like, two new protocols, and I think Walmart canned what they were doing with chat, GPT, and like, all sorts is happening. So this space keeps moving. But if people want to keep up with you and everything you're doing at PayPal, where do they go to do that?

Speaker 1  37:41  

Go to our website, where we have announcements. And hopefully you can also enjoy our experiences in whatever agentic commerce app you might be in. So use PayPal to check out on perplexity, check out on copilot, other surfaces where we're coming soon. And if you're a merchant, hopefully store sync is starting to work for you and give us feedback on that as well, so we can continue to improve

Sy Taylor  38:02  

it. Heck yeah. Bam, for you and mesh,

Bam Azizi  38:04  

meshpay.com or mesh pay on LinkedIn and Twitter or X, you can find me. Bam, as easy mesh cross platforms,

Sy Taylor  38:11  

you'll find me at sy Tai will all the socials screaming into the void@fintechbrainfood.com and, of course, over at tempo dot XYZ, trying to make the world a little bit better, one stable coin, Blockchain at a time. Thank you very much everybody for watching and listening. Now I've got to remind you all to please, please hit like buttons, subscribe buttons and spam all of your friends to find the show too. Leave comments and reviews. It actually helps us. It really does. So if you enjoyed this conversation even half as much as I have, I hope you'll do that, and I Hope you'll catch us next time bye for now.