Visa's new pathway to Empowerment Tech, and is Google Wallet the next Google Maps?
Plus: Perplexity's browser will track everything users do online, and trust will be carried in your wallet and proven by the people who know you best
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Reminder: Berlin Customer Futures Meetup this Tuesday
Join us for an informal catch-up over drinks. To chat about all things Empowerment Tech. AI Agents, digital wallets and more. It would be great to see you.
BERLIN: 6pm, Tuesday 6th May 2025
2nd floor Bar, Motel One, Alexanderplatz, Grunerstraße 11, Berlin (here).
It’s the first night of the EIC conference (DM me if you want to grab a coffee)
Delighted to announce that the drinks will be sponsored by Digidentity.
BARCELONA: 6.30pm, Tuesday 10th June 2025
Main bar, Torre Melina, Gran Meliá Hotel, Av. Diagonal, 671, Les Corts, Barcelona (here)
I’ll be speaking at PhocusWright Europe (let me know if you want to connect in person)
Hi everyone,
Some huge market updates this week to dive into. But first, I want to mention something that’s been nagging me.
Lots of people have been using the word ‘ecosystems’. But they are wrong. Including me.
When you work on digital wallets and personal data stores, the whole story is something like:
“Once an individual can control and share data with the people and organisations around them, we can unleash a new digital ecosystems”
But that’s wrong. I think what’s actually unleashed is just another data network. But where the individual as an active participant. Not just a passive ‘user’ or ‘data subject’.
Why?
Because you can design a network.
You can manage participants, control the governance, and enable commercial models. You can define rules for security, privacy and data portability. Where the network is made of end points - people, orgs, things, agents, whatever.
It’s structured, defined, planned.
But an ecosystem is different. It’s about what emerges. You don’t build or design an ecosystem. Rather, you create the right conditions and let it form. Through symbiosis, feedback, and value exchange. All in balance.
That’s the thing about ecosystems. They depend on equilibrium, and without it, they die fast.
So let’s be honest. We’re not creating ecosystems. We’re building new data networks. But where individuals become first-class citizens, and data peers.
Not just “eyeballs with gullets and wallets” (possibly one of the best lines ever written, in the immortal “Cluetrain Manifesto” - if you don’t know that history, go look it up).
Anyway, the real power comes when those new data networks tip into something alive - an ecosystem. Not because we engineered it, but because we let it emerge.
These new customer data networks are all part of the future of being a digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Trust will be carried in your wallet, and proven by the people who know you best
Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online… to sell ads
Visa announces AI Agent Payment APIs - and a pathway to Empowerment Tech
Is Google Wallet the next Google Maps?
Coming to a wallet near you soon
… and much more
So sit yourself down, grab a cuppa, and Let’s Go.
Trust will be carried in your wallet, and proven by the people who know you best
Alex Walz is a hidden gem. Writing about the complex data economy and digital trust in such a simple, brilliant way.
His recent post about the ‘blue checkmark’ really cuts through the noise:
“On X, it means you paid $8. But on Bluesky, it means “someone credible vouched for you.
“But Bluesky Social’s new Trusted Verifier model shifts verification from top-down control to community-rooted trust:
Organizations like the New York Times can verify members – their photographers, journalists, and staff
Every identity is anchored to a decentralized identifier (DID) – a portable, cryptographically secure ID you control
Users can link their own domain name to their identity, proving ownership of websites and brands in a user-centric way
You can even hide the badge if it’s not your thing
“Trust doesn’t come only from the top down; it emerges from relationships, communities, and shared context.
“And while [Bluesky] still curates who can issue verifications, it reflects a deeper shift: platforms stepping back, communities stepping in.
“The next era of the web won’t ask, ‘Who verfiied you”. It’ll ask, “Who knows you?”
Fantastic observations. But it’s Alex’s punchline that’s gets my pull-quote of the year:
“In this future, trust won’t be bestowed by platforms. It’ll be earned through connection, carried in your wallet, and proven by the people who know you best.”
Make sure you put Alex on your must-read feed each week. You won’t regret it.
Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online… to sell ads
“Here’s your AI answer on astrophysics, but while I have you, have you seen this great offer for a holiday?”
It was inevitable. The dam had to break.
Exhibit 17B: The new Perplexity Browser.
Let’s go back a bit. A while ago, Perplexity announced that it’s developing a browser. My first thought was, ‘of course’. AI Agents are going to need an interface, and that’s likely going to be an app, and via the browser. ‘Owning the customer’, as they say.
But then ta-da! Suprise! TechCrunch reports that their CEO is pretty clear-eyed about the grubby data opportunity:
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you.
“What are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you.”
“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there”
I am shocked, shocked I tell you. That there is gambling going on in this casino!
Sadly, this is just digital gravity. Given enough time, and enough VC investment, all digital services end up building a customer profile to either a) sell the data or b) show ads.
How depressing.
It’s why I’m bullish on Empowerment Tech. And the opportunity to open up new, sustainable, ethical and scalable revenue streams with customer data.
Where those new digital services will be done with and for customers. Not done to them.
Visa announces AI Agent Payment APIs - and a pathway to Empowerment Tech
Some huge new announcements from Visa this week on 'Intelligent Commerce'.
And there’s a lot to unpack:
New ‘AI-Ready Cards’ - new tokenised payment credentials, where only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential
MyPoV: You can see that this is a baby step towards approving the sharing of all sorts of verified personal data and credentials, not just payments
Updates to their ‘Flexible Credential’ - where customers can choose different payment options with their card
MyPoV: It’s really only a small leap - and a matter of time - until verifiable credentials are included in those payment transactions
A new ‘Payment Acceptance API’ - now any smartphone can soon accept payments from any Visa card holder, which is billions of people
MyPoV: What if Visa actually just launched a new global acceptance network for verifiable customer data, not just card payments? “Just tap and go to accept data”.. I can see >18, proof of resident, tickets and all the rest… and voila, Visa just took on Apple Wallet, but with much greater reach
An Identity API - a neat feature to ‘tap’ your card on your phone, to bind your card to your device and a biometric - it’s a smart new authentication step that can approve card (and of course AI Agent) payments
MyPoV: Like the other APIs above, we can flip this from just approving card payments, to approving sharing all types of verifiable credentials - and ensure that it’s the customer involved in important transactions… think seamless onboarding to any digital service, anywhere that accepts Visa (which is everywhere), with only a tap and a face check
Phew, lots to digest.
But there’s more.
Most excitingly, it looks like there's an Empowerment Tech play. With trust, transparency and control embedded at the centre of all this, by design.
All my PoV bullets above are about the future. How Visa can extend the sharing and approving of card payments (today) over to verifiable credentials and personal data (tomorrow).
But they’ve actually already started. With some baby steps.
Yes, these new APIs enable AI agents to interact with businesses on behalf of the customer. But they’ve added - with consent - the sharing of high-level verified customer data attributes.
Taken from the customer’s own transaction history. Preferences. Profile information. Even intent. All part of a new customer data taxonomy now made available by Visa.
Verified attributes that the customer might want to share with a business, to improve a transaction or an agent-based search. And customers can turn it on and off as they wish. Neat.
But how does consent work? Well that’s the interesting part.
It’s been developed with input from Inrupt. Tim Berners Lee’s team behind the Solid Protocol, powering new, customer-controlled Agentic Wallets.
Where consent can come from the customer’s own data sources… including a digital wallet.
This Visa announcement matters for two reasons.
First, Visa is now recognising the real architecture of the emerging AI economy. Personal AI agents won’t just be an extension of chatbots, they'll be able to act on behalf of customers.
And without a tech stack like this - making customer context, consent and payments standardised and portable - Agentic Commerce will be hard to adopt. Every brand would need to deal with hundreds of thousands of different customer formats and data sets.
These new APIs clean all that up.
But second, the news highlights the huge role that personal data control is going to play in the new digital economy. And in ‘A-Commerce’. Yes, standards for payments are important. But standards for consented access to personal data are arguably more important.
If AI agents are going to deliver personal, trusted experiences, they are going to need direct access to customer-controlled data. Not just new ways to push credit card numbers around.
Visa’s recent work with Inrupt is worth paying attention to.
Just as we showed in a recent Customer Futures post on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), these kinds of Agent APIs aren’t just about payments. They are the beginning of a new customer relationship. Where the customer’s agent arrives first, bringing verified context with it.
But.
We must be careful.
What if brands misuse this new trusted customer channel? You can bet that some companies will start using these APIs as just another ‘technical tick box’, rather than seeing them as part of a deeper digital customer shift.
And you can be sure that early implementations will focus heavily on the speed of payments, not about the customer relationship. Or indeed building customer value and trust.
If brands don’t put in place the right foundations for privacy, consent and customer control, it’s going to be a mess.
I’m betting that many businesses will predictably rush in to collect as much customer data as possible via the customer’s AI agent.
So we need to ask some hard questions about these new customer data APIs:
Will brands be able to demonstrate real, verifiable consent from the customer?
Is the customer data they are sharing accurate anyway?
Will businesses truly understand the customer’s context and intent?
The missing piece here isn’t more data aggregation. It’s Empowerment Tech.
Meaning data wallets and Personal AI on the customer’s side. Where Personal AI Agents can share real customer preferences, real constraints, and real intent. Just like the latest work from Inrupt and their prototype AI Agent, ‘Charlie’.
Otherwise, businesses will keep playing the same old customer data game, making the same old assumptions and mistakes about customers.
Rather than creating value with personal data and building customer trust.
These updates are clearly a set of pretty smart moves by Visa. And these new data standards matter. But digital tools on the customer’s side matter even more.
Because the future of Agentic Commerce isn’t just about transactions. It’s about rebuilding trust.
And this time, the customer and their AI Agent are going to be in control.
VISA ANNOUNCEMENT, INRUPT’S WALLETS
Is Google Wallet the next Google Maps?
We’ve known for a while that Google was adding Government ID to the digital wallet. But now it’s here in the UK, and you’ll be able to scan your passport.
And it’s putting even more identity cats amongst the already very crowded UK ID pigeons.
The hawk-eyed Richard Oliphant sets out the mixed response to this pretty big news:
“Competing with the Google Wallet - and, one assumes, the Apple Wallet - to provide identity verification and authentication will make this even more challenging.
“Survival will depend on the ability of identity providers to differentiate their products and expand their reach into regulated industry sectors through integrations with the likes of Docusign and Adobe.
“Whilst certification against the DIATF makes strategic sense, I wonder whether the stringent data privacy requirements might pose a problem. They won't, for example, allow Google to monetise identity data and feed it into their Targeted Advertising Machine . (This is less problematic for Apple).
“If Google certifies its Wallet against the DIATF, I regard it as more likely that they will seek to certify a version of their Wallet as an "EU Digital Identity Wallet" under the EU eidas framework. This would allow them to offer their Wallet for strong customer authentication in EU banking (and other regulated sectors) and to store EU mobile driving licences too.”
Lots and lots of debate around this.
From ‘it was inevitable, and who else can match the user experience’ to ‘are you kidding, more surveillance?’.
But the more important take isn’t about identity wallets. It’s about the other credentials that customers can wrap around them.
Proof of insurance. Proof of attendance. Proof of membership. Proof of license. And much, much more. A long tail of evidence about people that isn’t currently digital or portable.
Until now.
Google has the reach, the business relationships, the balance sheet, and the infrastructure to make verifiable credentials go mainstream. And I mean for everyone. A bit like Google Maps.
And frankly, like Google Maps, they can do it all for ‘free.’
Why?
Because even if they can’t see what’s in the wallet (though likely they will), customers will get more utility with it. And that means more transactions, more payments, and more revenue.
Just like Google Maps.
You make the core utility free, then make money from all the data that surrounds it. The vast 2nd-order data networks that emerge as a result.
You see, the smart brands won’t make money WITH customer data. They’ll make money BECAUSE of it. Welcome folks, to the 2nd-order impacts of digital ID.
Will Google Wallet be as big as Google Maps? I wouldn’t bet against it.
As Richard rightly concludes, it’s time to ‘buckle up’.
Coming to a wallet near you soon
My goodness, the wallet people have been busy.
Worth checking out the Gataca’s recent high-level round-up of the global activity on digital ID wallets. From the US to Ukraine.
Honestly, looking back to 2016 and the pioneering work at Evernym, I feel amazed and proud at how far we’ve come.
From janky demos of wallets and credentials that weren’t remotely standardised. To showing off the power of ‘selective disclosure’ in action. To combining credentials from different sources in one simple ‘proof’.
It’s not often you get to be part of a global movement. Let alone one that’s going to change the worldwide economy so profoundly.
So it’s worth pausing to say thank you to everyone working on any of these important projects, and Empowerment Tech more generally.
With all that’s going on with crazy politics, crazy BigTech, and crazy AI platforms, there’s never been a more important time to be working on customer data and citizen empowerment.
OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Futures things to include this week.
So here are some more links to chew on:
Post: Apple’s failure to ship a single useful AI feature is looking even more risky READ
Idea: It's not about Self-Sovereign Identity but ‘Self-Sovereign Compute’ (SSC) WATCH
Post: The OAuth2 buttons littering the web aren't just login shortcuts - they're extraction points in the attention economy READ
Research: New Gartner report on The Buyer’s Guide to Identity Verification READ
Article: Google Confirms Gmail Update Choice — 3 Billion Users Must Now Decide READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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