Mastercard Is Developing the RIGHT Product WRONG

I worked at Mastercard for 7 years. I even won the CEO Force for Good Award. Spent a few of those years building small business products. You know what small businesses already figured out? You don’t give every employee the company card. You give them something with limits, categories, expiration dates.

NOT because small businesses don’t trust people. Because unconstrained delegation doesn’t work in the real world.

Now we’re about to hand AI shopping assistants our personal credit cards.
If your kid wants Robux, do you give them your Sapphire card with a $50 limit, merchant blocks, real-time alerts, and liability protection? Or do you buy a $50 gift card?

You buy the gift card. Because the mental model is different. One says “act freely, we’ll monitor you.” The other says “here’s your boundary, that’s it.”
Now swap “kid” with “AI agent.”

I mean am I the only one who is watching Moltbot? https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/from-clawdbot-to-moltbot-to-openclaw/

And here’s what nobody’s saying: when every consumer has an AI agent negotiating at machine speed, what’s fast when everyone else is fast too?
Price wars collapse margins. Great for consumers until there’s no competition left. See: Amazon, small business.

Agents optimize for speed over fit. Fastest answer wins, not right answer.
Merchants start gaming agent behavior instead of earning trust. SEO 2.0, but humans can’t play.

Mastercard, Visa and I’m guessing American Express are building impressive infrastructure. For credit…

But nobody’s asking if we should even be giving software our credit card in the first place.

These are Fortune 1000 companies with the infrastructure and talent to build something FUNDAMENTALLY different. But they’re optimizing the old tool instead of asking if the old tool was ever right for this job.

Maybe someone reading this will see the difference between me calling something out and being mean. Or maybe they won’t.

Truthfully, I don’t think I’m being mean. I think I’m doing exactly what Mastercard taught me to do. You think through a payments problem and make it safe, trusted and reliable for users, every time. I know they still can.