JPMorgan Partners With Thunes to Expand Cross-Border Payouts

Visa teamed up with Mastercard and Ant International to build common standards for verifying AI purchasing agents, sending its shares up roughly 1.3% to $366.229 at 10.49am ET on Thursday morning. The company's Trusted Agent Protocol gives approved AI agents signed credentials that merchants can recognize, drawing a line between legitimate shopping assistants and hostile bots without forcing retailers or payment companies to rebuild the financial plumbing beneath every transaction. Visa's opportunity is to keep control of the valuable layers of authorization, tokenization and fraud protection even when software makes the buying decision. The stock remains 9.38% below its GF Value estimate of $404.14, leaving a visible valuation gap despite the day's advance. The standards strengthen Visa's position, but the payoff depends on AI agents generating new payment volume instead of merely replacing transactions consumers already make.

Mastercard is expanding into agentic commerce through Agent Connect even as major banks demand tougher safeguards for AI shopping agents, with fraud, scams and data-privacy risks moving into focus. The payments network's merchant tools can combine Anthropic's commerce-agent blueprint with Mastercard's payment intelligence and authorization controls, aiming to let AI shop for consumers while keeping Mastercard at the center of every transaction. Shares rose roughly 0.9% to $564.98 at 10.47am ET on Thursday morning. The opportunity carries sharp edges: shopping bots could drive more payment volume, but misunderstood instructions, disputed purchases and murky liability could also inflate network costs. At $564.98, Mastercard trades 17.49% below its GF Value of $684.73.

Travelers can now use Solana-based digital dollars to book flights across more than 300 airlines, according to a recent announcement. The move extends Solana stablecoin payments into airline ticketing, covering a network of over 300 carriers. No further details on the participating airlines, launch partners, or transaction terms were provided in the announcement.