Simon Taylor

Nerd in AI and Finance. Ranting @ - Views 100% my own

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Stripe acquired OpenRouter. Ramp launched Router.

Both are leaning into stablecoins.

Cloud, mobile, and APIs are now table stakes, not an investable category.

The next era of finance is something else. https://t.co/tSlI1xTKkT

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@tkkong @eglyman @tryramp @geoffintech True OGs!

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Ramp is worth $60bn and 70% of its R&D team is working on products it hasn't released yet.

I sat down with @eglyman in New York to discus

Why he thinks of @tryramp as a productivity company more than fintech

The 7,000 pull requests their non-engineers wrote last quarter

The trust charter, stablecoins, and whether an AI agent would choose your business.

Full conversation 👇

00:00 Introduction
03:16 Is fintech dead? And why Ramp considers itself a productivity company
04:41 Why AI token costs are turning software into financial products
07:27 How Ramp's Inspect lets non engineers ship code using AI
11:51 Why AI is becoming the third major category of business spend
18:43 What justifies Ramp's valuation and its accelerating revenue growth
27:07 How AI is transforming employee productivity and customer support workflows
39:54 Why Ramp applied for an OCC national trust bank charter
43:15 How stablecoins enable faster cross border payments and protection against currency volatility
47:23 Will autonomous AI agents replace Ramp or choose its financial infrastructure?
51:01 The future of agentic companies and Ramp's mission to eliminate waste

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Find the full conversation here on YouTube:

https://t.co/d3ERoLG2A3

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

And remember to subscribe at https://t.co/YwvwqgnocF if you want more like this

[Cuy Sheffield @cuysheffield]

It’s an exciting time for Visa’s stablecoin business. Visa CEO Ryan McInerney shared some updates on our strategy and traction on yesterday’s earnings call.

[Shivani Siroya @shivsiroya]

For a decade, we've built credit for people the financial system couldn't see.

Now there's a new kind of thin-file borrower: the AI agent.

Here's my take👇 https://t.co/8lwpBamimL

[Tempo @tempo]

1/ Stablecoins provide banks with an opportunity to grow deposits.

As businesses get paid in stablecoins, they'll move idle balances into tokenized deposits, which count as cash and support credit lines. Banks that offer them early win that business.

[Mallesh Pai @malleshpai]

Deposit tokens vs stablecoins got framed as a fight. From where we're looking it looks more like a stack. Deposit tokens make good reserves, both for the banks and sensitive holders like corporate treasuries: they pay interest and stay inside the bank perimeter. Stablecoins make good bearer money: anyone can hold, no account needed.

Put one under the other and an issuer can rebalance reserves in code, at 3am on a Sunday, instead of through wires and cutoff times, leading to a better experience for everyone involved.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@sliver86 @stripe It's closed loop

"financial accounts"

are the former stripe treasury accounts.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@jsfranklin221 It's competing with a fiat account.

Storing in stables means you keep the stablecoin float, and can attach any payment method you like.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Instinct just gave AI agents a budget they can spend without asking you.

Each agent gets a stablecoin wallet, but the purchases themselves still run on card rails.

Here's how it works

1. You load a balance into the wallet
2. Set a per-purchase limit
3. Tell the agent what to buy, and it draws down from that balance.

The demo shows a user adding $700, asking for their favorite lunch every day for a week, then concert tickets.

Under the hood, each agent holds OUSD (a stablecoin) in a Privy wallet on Tempo. So you’d be forgiven for thinking the card schemes are cooked.

But actually, here's how it works for a $50 purchase:

- The agent initiates a card purchase against the user’s balance.
- Stripe sells $50 of stablecoin and converts it to dollars.
- The dollars fund a prepaid card account at Lead Bank.
- The purchase runs through Visa and the merchant gets paid the way it always does. The merchant needs no wallet.

It’s a card in all but name. The stablecoin step still buys three things.

1. The balance can earn yield for Stripe or its partners while it waits to be spent.
2. One balance can fund many cards, plus wire, ACH and stablecoin payments. A card only ever draws from that card’s balance.
3. Once enough users hold a stablecoin balance, agents can pay other agents or any stablecoin endpoint directly.

Cynics will say we can already do all of this, and they’ll be right. Banks and card networks are watching anyway, because a wallet competes with the account as the default place to hold a balance.

Everyday spending is the consumer wedge for AI. Cash App, Chime and Revolut peeled off everyday spend first and won the paycheck later. Consumer agents are starting in the same place.

Zuckerberg said during earnings that shopping is Muse’s most common use case, with an average purchase over $200.

A balance is the first step toward agents managing budgets, and then money more broadly.

We're heading to a world of everything agents.

With everything wallets.

And those wallets might find it easier to hold stables than fiat.

[Noah Shinn @noahrshinn]

Give your Instinct a budget

Built with @Stripe and @link, we're launching Link balance in @instinct. You can now set a budget for your Instinct to make purchases on your behalf, and Instinct does the rest.

You choose how much money to add and set a limit for each purchase. Your Instinct can spend within those limits, without needing access to your credit card or asking for approval every time.

That means buying tickets as soon as the presale opens, picking up your size when the trail runners restock, or reordering your favorite coffee beans every other week.

Link balance is rolling out to Instinct users across the US starting today, with New York coming soon.

Ask your Instinct to set up Link balance and it’ll send you a link to get started.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@DoDataThings @jevgenijs SLIDE?!

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

I love the frame that brand marketing is arbitrage against performance marketing.

Because you can measure performance (pay-per-click), it's well-priced.

But if you do the math on how many people travel through an airport, and see the logo it works out better.

That's what @Revolut did 👇

[niran @niran7]

Based. Not many founders/CEOs have the balls to do brand marketing. Most just live in a perpetual cycle of performance ads. @NStoronsky on @davidsenra’s podcast.

“If you’re a digital bank, you don’t have branches. People don’t see you physically, so they trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyds, JP Morgan Chase."

"So how do you build trust? In performance marketing you pay per impression, and there are a lot of spaces in the physical world you can buy that also produce impressions, at a much cheaper price. We bought almost 50% of all airports in Europe. Simple math. How many times a year people travel, how many times they’re in the airport, how many impressions we produce, how much it costs us. There is arbitrage to performance marketing.”

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@DoDataThings Killer stat

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@jsfranklin221 Avoids you linking a prepaid card like apple cash.

You can spin up one time use cards, often higher auth rates / potentially lower fraud.

[Digital Asset Summit 2026 @blockworksDAS]

DAS LONDON:
Building The New Standard for Global Money Movement

with @zcabrams & @sytaylor

Wednesday Nov 11 in London.
Be there: https://t.co/w9Bk04BHuO

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Correction

It does not YET use OUSD!

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Instinct now lets you give your AI agent a balance to spend within limits.

That balance sits in stablecoins.

The purchase can still run through Visa.

But your bank should watch where you keep the money between purchases. https://t.co/zZYHeLEF8U

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

@Martinoleary And having that's person name there *doesn't prevent it from going wrong*

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Ahh "new product approval"

The real reasons banks suck.

Bank regulation assumes a process where you spend time pushing paper before launching a product materially prevents risk.

Narrator: It does not.

[Max Karpis @maxkarpis]

Bank of England orders review of Revolut’s product approval processes

The Bank of England’s PRA has ordered a Section 166 review of Revolut’s product approval processes, according to the Financial Times. The order came earlier this year, around the time Revolut finally secured its full UK banking licence in March. The aim is to examine the risks around rapid launches of new financial products and better understand the robustness of the group’s internal systems.

A Section 166 forces a firm to appoint external experts—accountants or lawyers—to examine its controls and produce a report with recommendations. It is an evidence-gathering tool. If failures are found, regulators can then impose penalties or take other action.

This follows earlier action by the European Central Bank. Last year the ECB found “deficiencies” in Revolut’s new product approval processes and ordered a third-party review of its risk, compliance and legal functions governing new product launches in Europe. The move came after CEO Nik Storonsky said he likes employees to act like “self-guided missiles” with little oversight when developing products.

Revolut’s wait for a full UK licence was already the longest of any bank in the country. With the licence now granted, the Section 166 shows regulators still want extra safeguards in place before Revolut pushes further into core banking products. The practical question is how far this slows product velocity. Whoever leaked the detail has also made visible a level of supervisory attention we normally don't know about.

[Stable Takes @stable_takes]

Stable Takes is back with Episode 4. Join @dwr and @sytaylor for 20 minutes on the top stories in stablecoins and agentic payments.

In this episode:

• JPMorgan’s deposit tokens on Ethereum
• Money20/20 takeaways: Agentic payments and stablecoins
• What GENIUS Act rulemaking means for stablecoin rewards