American Express Has a Strong Moat but Visa and Mastercard's Duopoly May Be Wider

Entersekt and SEB Baltic have reinforced their partnership to enhance digital payment security across the Baltic region, focusing on evolving authentication needs. The collaboration uses Entersekt's 3-D Secure Access Control Server to support various authentication methods, balancing robust security with a smooth customer experience. The two organizations said the partnership addresses technical, regulatory and operational challenges in payment authentication, emphasizing deep collaboration beyond mere product provision. As digital payment landscapes evolve, they aim to adapt their strategies to meet changing security and customer experience requirements. The news was originally reported by Simply Wall St, citing Entersekt on GlobeNewswire.

AnyPay Co., Ltd., a fintech provider of electronic payment acceptance systems, has been certified under the ISO/IEC 29110-4-1:2018 standard. Santhawat Sinacharoen, Chairman of the Executive Board, stated that this marks another important step in elevating the organization's work processes and capabilities, particularly in the Payment Technology business, which must prioritize quality, accuracy, stability, and reliability of systems at every stage of service delivery. He noted that the standard is not merely a quality certification mark, but a guideline that helps establish a clear software development framework, covering planning, development, testing, management, and software delivery, while supporting systematic control and monitoring of work processes at each stage. Because the systems involve financial transactions and user data, adopting a software development process standard helps strengthen internal processes and supports building confidence among customers and business partners. Santhawat added that the company continues to develop its organizational standards continuously, alongside technology and security standards, in preparation for business expansion and to meet the demand for digital payments, which tends to grow steadily.

Mastercard announced a probability score for AI-initiated transactions on September 30, positioning the capability inside its Agentic Commerce Trust Framework alongside Cloudflare for web and payment signal feeds and Skyfire for Know Your Agent verification. The probability score adds a second layer to the trust stack that agent commerce requires, evaluating each AI-initiated transaction dynamically to produce a trust score at the moment of execution rather than asking whether a transaction is legitimate. It builds on Skyfire's Know Your Agent framework, which Mastercard integrated earlier this year and which issues credentials and verifies agent identity at the point of transaction, a foundation also pursued by Baselayer, which raised $35 million to build Know Your Agent infrastructure. With the probability score in place, the trust infrastructure for agent commerce now has four visible layers: Know Your Agent identity verification, transaction-level probability scoring, payment execution with guardrails such as Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite and Visa's Intelligent Commerce, and consumer protection signals that remain nascent and fragmented.