Simon Taylor on Agentic Payments and Opportunities

Podcast Episode

Fintech Layer Cake
May 07, 2025
Season 3, Episode 6

In this episode of FinTech Layer Cake, host Reggie Young welcomes back Simon Taylor—fintech thought leader, writer of Fintech Brainfood, and Head of Strategy & Content at Sardine.

They explore the rapidly emerging world of agentic payments and what Visa’s new tokenization framework means for AI-driven commerce. Simon also unpacks real-world use cases, from “vibe shopping” to automated business purchasing, and what hurdles—like consumer trust and fraud—still stand in the way.

The conversation then shifts to Sardine’s groundbreaking Agentic Oversight Framework, which shows how AI agents can safely handle complex compliance tasks like KYC.

Whether you’re building AI tools, working in compliance, or just curious about the next frontier in payments—this is an essential listen.

Transcript

Simon Taylor on Agentic Payments and Opportunities

Reggie Young:

Welcome back to Fintech Layer Cake, where we uncover secret recipes and practical insights from fintech leaders and experts. I'm your host, Reggie Young, Chief of Staff at Lithic. On today's episode, I chat with Simon Taylor, the author of the widely read Fintech Brainfood and head of strategy and content at Sardine.

In the past six months or so, the AI conversation has changed from talking about AI to talking about agents and agentic workflows. For folks who might not be familiar, an agent refers to an AI application that can actually engage with the digital world and take actions for you. So instead of just giving you text answers or images, it can go on websites and take actions for you, like booking a reservation. At Lithic, we've been thinking and preparing ourselves to support this agentic payment transition, so this is very top of mind for us.

Simon joined me to talk about two big AI agent topics. First, Visa announced a path for supporting AI agentic payments with a new tokenization framework. And second, Sardine released a cutting-edge white paper laying out how to use AI agents safely in AML and related workflows based on actual case studies they've done. Both of these are exciting and game-changing developments in fintech, so you don't want to miss this episode.

Simon Taylor:

Well, let's see. The honest answer is I don't know. But generally, the pattern is e-commerce, we saw it come along, and the card networks were going to be displaced by PayPal, but they weren't. What ended up happening is people ended up putting their 16-digit card number and their expiry, typing it in directly. So the card networks were just fine. And then it turned out that wasn't very secure, and so they came up with this tokenization idea.

The mobile commerce. Mobile commerce was absolutely going to kill the card networks because there were going to be all these new things from Apple Pay, but it ended up just reinforcing the card networks and kind of coming back around. This is when mobile payments actually started to leak into digital wallets and Apple Pay, where you can now add your card to your Apple Pay wallet, to your Google Pay wallet. And when you do that, you tokenize the card itself.

Now, the vast majority of traffic on Visa and Mastercard's network is in fact tokens. It's not the classic [make] Stripe stuff. It's a major upgrade from where we've been. There's network tokens. There's processor tokens. It's tokens all the way down. There's a Token Layer Cake that Chuck Yu over at VGS wrote on Brainfood a little while ago. And I thought it was a really good explanation of like, actually, there's network tokens and then there's all of these other ones.

If you follow that pattern, then it's quite logical that- just as I turned a card into a token and was able to put it into an Apple wallet, can I turn a card into a token and put it into an agent? And when I put it in there, I know it came from that agent. I'm able to authenticate that agent and know which particular agent it was because it's got a unique token. And that unique token can have properties associated with it, to your point about what it was not allowed to do and allowed to do, a little bit like a virtual card.

And I think the fact that both card schemes announced this, the fact that it follows Stripe and PayPal and a few others who have SDKs and they were sort of doing a kludgy thing with virtual cards, this really brings it into like, here are the tools you can build with. So we'll see if this gets any volume, because right now, OpenAI's operator is hiding inside of a box, and there is no agentic commerce volume whatsoever. Or if there is, most people don't know it exists. And it's probably bad actors at this point.

Reggie Young:

It's a lot of really fun, novel, thorny questions to think through. I like your analogy. Is it more like IoT, or is it more like mobile payments? That framework will evolve, but it's fairly unknown. Visa's proposal, it's a great one. It's a phenomenal starting place. It's also like, okay, we'll see what the market does.

Simon Taylor:

Once you've got the tokens, you can start playing with it. I think it's vibe shopping. Actually, the decision paralysis of shopping is still a pain in the backside. I use O3 to make basic purchasing decisions quite often because it's going to think things through, and it's going to tell me why it made the choices.

The example Visa gave, I actually thought was a good one, which is, you got a wedding coming up, you need a new outfit for it. So it looks up the location of it. It looks at what guests typically wear at such a thing. It takes your sizes that it knows about and orders you the stuff to arrive at your hotel when you get there.

But I also think, just personal use case, just ordering the groceries every week. Just change it up a little bit. Rotate the snacks for the kids. Rotate the good vegetables. Prepare my menus. Just offload my admin. So I think on the consumer side, it's solved the decision paralysis and just go do the thing. It's where you've got a go decide and then buy, because the buy is like the end of, typically, a complex process of thoughts.

Reggie Young:

Once you've spent a lot of time thinking about fintech, like products and the product experience, it's really hard not to.

Simon Taylor:

But you see this with live coding now, right? Engineers still have to know what they want, and what they want to achieve, and what they want to do, and the best way. There's still a massive gap between a great engineer that can use one of the modern coding tools, like Windsurf or Cursor, to me.

Reggie Young:

Absolutely, interesting. When product market fit hits with AI, it's fast. So you’ve got to be ready for it. I expect we'll have some uptake, but I also imagine the tokenization framework is great.

Simon Taylor:

So much more, because there are so many things like, yes, inventory management, but there's a bunch of stuff you have to buy.

Reggie Young:

Yeah. If only they had become product managers in fintech instead of doubled down on their fraud careers, so there will be a better place. No, I love it.

Simon Taylor:

It's that sort of threat underneath the surface, which is- in the US anyway, that what if narrow banking comes from stablecoins, and what happens if- whilst there's less enforcement action coming at the federal level, maybe 50 states enforcing things at different levels is actually going to be even more challenging to deal with.

Reggie Young:

Yeah, the California one's really interesting. They passed this week consent or against a bank that was from California, a fintech being sponsored from California without the federal regulator also entering a similar consent, or just kind of unusual.

Simon Taylor:

Yeah, so there’s that, and then I think California state, one of the trollers has come out with some sort of fine against one of the banks recently in the last couple of days. I expect to see a lot more of that.