Agentic Commerce Gets Lift from Santander and MasterCard PoC

Santander and Mastercard have completed an agentic payment, billed as Europe's first agentic commerce transaction within a regulated banking environment. It was conducted using Mastercard Agent Pay.

Agentic commerce is an emerging ecommerce category.

The grand vision is to allow purchases to be conducted using Mastercard's payment rails within conversational interfaces.

SWIFT backs Blockchain Ledger

SWIFT is adding a blockchain ledger to its infrastructure stack. 

It is developing this ledger with 30 financial institutions from 16 countries, including Absa, Banco Santander, Bank of America, BBVA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Emirates NBD, Societe Generale-FORGE, Wells Fargo and Royal Bank of Canada, taking part.

SWIFT CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso (CEO since 2019) remarked: "We...are moving at a rapid pace... to create the infrastructure stack of the future".

Will Bank of Burger King entrepreneur buy Prudential's Old Online Bank

Citi is reported to be looking to sell Egg, the UK online bank, as part of a wider disposal of assets, to simplify the "Frankenbank", that has apparently become too complex to manage.

Egg, created by Prudential, was bought by Citi in 2007 and potential buyers include BSCH and Metro Bank, the first new high-street bank to open in Britain for more than a century.

Metro Bank is backed by Vernon Hill, who also owns several Burger King franchises. 

He has a BS with concentration in finance from Wharton.

Citi has already dispensed with Phibro, a commodity trading unit acquired for net asset value, now owned by Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:OXY) and HQ'ed in Westport, Connecticut. They have a European office in Duke Street, London. (half-way house between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park). The business was sold due to concern's over its top executive's pay packet ($100m bonus in one year, nine-figure bonus) rather than business concerns.

In the first half of the year, Citi paid $75m to settle SEC charges over failing to disclose the extent of its subprime exposure (more than $40bn). This exposure came from the super-senior tranches of CDOs backed by subprime mortgages and related instruments called "liquidity puts". The puts allowed Citi customers to sell debt securities back to Citi at face value if credit markets froze; clearly Citi was betting that this would never happen.

Santander Mulls Brazil IPO, FOMC Upbeat

Santander has released details of its Brazilian unit's IPO which, if successful, will be Brazil's biggest ever, raising up to $7.3bn. Brazil Santander will be one of the world's top 30 banks.

In the US, FOMC is upbeat, holding interest rates low and extending its plan to buy back $1.25 trillion of MBS into Q1 2010. They announced the federal funds rate will be kept low (between 0 and 0.25%) for an extended period of time. FOMC meets eight times a year.

Plans to Nationalise Bank of Venezuela

Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has announced plans to nationalise Bank of Venezuela (Banco de Venezuela), one of the country's largest banks currently owned by Grupo Santander.

This is not the first nationalisation of Banco de Venezuela. It was nationalized in 1994 after a massive banking crisis which bankrupted 60 percent of the banking sector, privatized again 2 years later in 1996 and bought by the Spanish banking giant Grupo Santander for only 430 million US dollars.

Chavez was quoted as saying "Ladran, luego cabalgamos" (the dogs bark, therefore the caravan is moving).