Short-form thinking

Bill.com just cut 30% of its workforce and lost its CCO and CTO in the same week.

The $30 trillion B2B payments market has a 100 percent incentive problem.

New edition of The Long Game is up. The Next Internet Monopoly Will Start at the Payment Layer.

Card networks just opened their rails to AI agents. Most payments people missed it.

Corpay just moved its treasury onto stablecoin rails. Pilots ended this week.

Earlier this week, four things happened in payments that pointed in the same direction.

For a century we built work around the people who could sit still and think in straight lines.

Western Union replaced SWIFT with Solana. A 174-year-old remittance company picked a side.

The companies that built the global payment network monetize operational friction.

Stripe launched 288 products last week. One of them quietly made AI agents a first-class customer.

The last excuse for keeping humans in the AP inbox just expired. Last week, J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and three major CEOs made the case for AI agents moving money.

The People Who Can't Drive

Access to AI has been democratized. The capacity to wield it has not. And the gap is widening faster than any technology gap in human history.

Three things shipped between April 22 and April 27, and together they broke a five-year deadlock in B2B payments.

AI agents can initiate a payment. The settlement layer still expects a person. That gap turns into a liability problem fast.

This week's Long Game looks at the gap opening inside modern payments: AI agents can initiate transactions, but the system still expects a human when money moves.

This was the week the next payments stack showed its hand. On April 22, the IMF published a 26-page analysis of agentic payments.

The payments industry spent 20 years making it easier for humans to pay. Visa just signaled that era is ending.

War, Tariffs, and the AP Stack, $1.2 trillion in B2B payments moved through BofA's CashPro in the last quarter.

Visa, BofA, and the Fed all moved on B2B payments this week. AP software vendors should be nervous.

If execution is free, what are you actually selling? Last week, the New York Times profiled Matthew Gallagher.

One of the things I'm most proud of at Finexio is the partnership we've built with Visa.

One decision left. The wire approval. Jack Dorsey's Block moved toward that threshold this week.

Fraud is now a $442 billion industry. And it just got an AI upgrade. INTERPOL just released the data.

AI won't earn software margins. It will earn payments margins. I spent years inside both.

Every AP vendor is betting on the wrong control point. The market still treats invoice processing as the bottleneck.

Software is no longer something you buy. It is something you hire. You are not licensing access to a product anymore.

On Monday, we looked at how AI agents are aggressively absorbing the accounts payable function.

By 2026, one in five B2B sellers will need their own AI agent just to respond to RFPs.

Only 43% of CFOs are capturing the most valuable signal in their business. The signal is supplier behavior.

AI agents aren't just helping move money anymore. They're moving it themselves.