Three things Rick is watching this week: the programmable money layer forming in real time, Stripe’s quiet move into the agent economy infrastructure, and the governance gap that is opening up faster than most banks realize.
This is not a news summary. It is the pattern underneath the headlines, and what it means for the decisions in front of banking executives right now.
In this episode of What I’m Watching, Rick Mavrovich connects the dots on x402 payments, FIS Project Keystone, the Stripe and OpenRouter acquisition, and the EU AI Act, and explains why all three are operating model questions before they are technology questions.
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