As shopping and commerce gear up for an online horde of AI agents equipped to seek out and buy products, doubts are starting to emerge regarding how much discretion should be extended to those bits of code. In the latest development, research emerged early Wednesday indicating consumers using AI agents …

As spending enabled by stablecoins picks up momentum, payments players are beginning to see a need to guard against agentic transaction fraud involving cryptocurrency as the medium of exchange. The latest example of this unfolding concern emerged Thursday. Contending that “blockchain analytics was built for a pre-agentic world,” London-based risk-management …

Block Inc.’s Square point-of-sale unit said early Thursday it will support transactions at just under 100 locations belonging to Whit’s Frozen Custard, a 23-year-old restaurant chain based in Granville, Ohio. The move comes as the chain begins planning expansion to more locations. Whit’s, which operates stores in 11 states located …

The stablecoin-payments platform Circle Internet Group Inc. said early Tuesday it has agreed to acquire Tazapay, a business-to-business cross-border payments technology developer based in Singapore and serving financial institutions and payment-service providers. Tazapay processes more than $25 billion in payment volume annually, of which approximately 60% includes stablecoins. The parties …

As embedded services take on added importance in payments and banking, financial institutions are adding the products at a faster clip, presenting payments processors with new business opportunities. On Thursday, the processor FIS launched FIS Embedded Banking Platform, which it says is its first embedded-finance platform designed for banks. With …

U.S. small businesses registered a mixed performance in August, with dollar volume climbing but transactions dropping for the tenth straight month, according to the August Small Business Index released early Thursday by the payments processor Fiserv Inc. It all added up to a Small Business Index reading of 145, flat …

OpenPayd, a London-based provider of open-banking and stablecoin services, announced an expansion into the U.S. market, having acquired 43 state money-transfer licenses. Globally, the company processes more than $300 billion in volume yearly for more than 1,200 businesses. The announcement comes following OpenPayd’s integration this month of MSB USA Inc., …