SoftBank nears $625 million acquisition of payments firm SP.LINKS from Blackstone

Partior, which operates a blockchain-based payment network, announced on the 17th a partnership with LSEG DiSH, the settlement infrastructure arm of London Stock Exchange Group, to bring always-on settlement bank liquidity to international remittance networks. Partior is a blockchain-based interbank clearing and settlement network jointly founded in 2021 by JPMorgan, DBS Bank, and Temasek, with JPMorgan participating as one of its founding shareholders. Under the new framework, the two sides are developing a Multi Settlement Bank solution that combines LSEG DiSH's omnibus trust account with Partior's multi-currency clearing and settlement network, enabling 24/7 liquidity movement among multiple settlement banks. The aim is to reduce the need to pre-fund nostro and vostro accounts and to lessen reliance on remittance cut-off times. Partior, LSEG, and participating banks are currently conducting cross-industry testing and are preparing for a production launch in the first quarter of 2027 and for accepting additional settlement banks into the framework. Founding shareholder Standard Chartered and participating banks such as Deutsche Bank have also expressed their participation in the framework, with an eye toward future feature expansions such as intraday foreign exchange trading and securities settlement.

Europe has moved agentic payments into live production while the United States remains stalled over who bears the loss when an AI agent errs. Live end-to-end payments have been executed by Santander, Mastercard, ING, and Worldline, and on July 2, 2026, ING, Worldline, and Visa completed an agentic payment in Germany using Visa Payment Passkeys for biometric authentication. Mastercard has enabled all issuers in Europe at the network level for Agent Pay, backed by a new Lisbon Centre of Excellence for Innovation, with Mastercard Europe President Kelly Devine calling agentic payments a profound shift in how commerce is initiated and executed. In the US, the Treasury OIG has flagged ambiguity in Regulation E on agent authorization, and the AI AGENT Act introduced in July 2026 addresses fiduciary duties rather than liability allocation for agent misexecution, prompting the Consumer Bankers Association to recommend the industry write its own private network rules. Hypertrade data shows a 4,700% year-over-year increase in AI-generated traffic to retail sites, yet agentic commerce is less than 1% of US e-commerce, with only 23% of US consumers trusting generative AI to handle payment transactions and 93% of merchants saying the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases.

Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.