Data Tribe

Ant International just offered a money-back guarantee on AI agent transactions. Let that sink in. While Western banks are still debating whether to let AI touch a spreadsheet, Ant is so confident in its agents it will refund you if they hallucinate. AgentSafePay covers LLM hallucinations and intent deviation. No other payment provider on the planet is doing this. The gap between Asia and the West in agentic commerce isn't closing. It's accelerating. What would it take for Visa or Mastercard to offer the same guarantee? richturrin.substack.com/p/an… #fintech #tech #finserv #AI @BetaMoroney @efipm @BrettKing @spirosmargaris @jasuja @enricomolinari @mikeflache

This week's Cashless newsletter has three articles pulling the stablecoin dominance thesis apart. The cracks are structural. Stablecoins can't legally settle tokenized assets. 99.5% of their market cap is dollar-denominated while only 50% of global trade invoices in dollars. And the WTO says moving money fast isn't trade finance. No letters of credit, no guarantees, no risk mitigation. Settlement, currency, trade finance. Three pillars, three problems. JPMorgan, Citi, and Wells Fargo are already building the replacement with tokenized deposits launching in 2027. Everyone assumed stablecoins would become financial infrastructure. What if they're just the prototype? This week's topics: -The Battle for Tokenization's Soul Isn't About the Assets, but How You Pay for Them -Stablecoins' 99% Problem: The US Dollar -WTO: Stablecoins May Speed Payments but Not Trade Finance -Will AI Exterminate Humankind? That's the Wrong Question. -Prediction Markets Are Not the "Wisdom of the Crowd" if Just 3% Set the Price -Dive into the Knowledge Vaults — Start with two free reads -Chart and Art of the Day — Superapps Help China Take the Lead Over the US in AI Adoption buff.ly/RBYu9hz #fintech #tech #finserv #AI @BetaMoroney @efipm @BrettKing @spirosmargaris @jasuja @enricomolinari @mikeflache #CBDC #FinTech #FinServ @efipm @Kiffmeister @sonjadav @Jonas__Gross @conrad_kraft @JoshuaLipsky

89% of companies use AI. 80% of employees say it makes them more productive. But only 14% of banks even measure AI ROI comprehensively. So when someone tells you AI is delivering, ask: delivering what, exactly? Most organizations can't answer that because they never built the measurement framework. You can't prove returns you don't track. The 6% of companies seeing real financial impact aren't luckier. They just bothered to define what "working" means before they started spending. Everyone else is flying blind and calling it progress. How do you prove ROI on something you've decided not to measure? richturrin.substack.com/p/th… #fintech #tech #finserv #AI @BetaMoroney @efipm @BrettKing @spirosmargaris @jasuja @enricomolinari @mikeflache

89% of companies deploy AI. Only 6% see real financial returns. That's not an adoption problem. That's a measurement crisis and why I put together this week's SPECIAL EDITION on AI ROI. Most companies are grading AI on whether it cuts costs. Wrong test. The real value is in better decisions, compounded over time. But nobody's balance sheet has a line item for decision quality, so companies chase headcount reductions instead and call it progress. Meanwhile, AI-attributed layoffs hit 112,713 through July. Firms are firing the people whose judgment makes AI useful. At what point does cutting your way to ROI become cutting your way to irrelevance? richturrin.substack.com/p/sp… #fintech #tech #finserv #AI @BetaMoroney @efipm @BrettKing @spirosmargaris @jasuja @enricomolinari @mikeflache

The AI battle has completely turned. The race is no longer about who has the smartest model. Kimi K3 matches Anthropic's Fable at roughly one-third the cost. Deutsche Bank says open-weight competition is forcing Silicon Valley providers to cap pricing and stay flexible. Jensen Huang said it out loud: "Free AI should be great for chips." Data centers win no matter whose model runs. The model providers are the ones bleeding. When 80% of US startups already use Chinese models, who exactly does a ban protect? #China #techwar #chips #tech @baoshaoshan @thecyrusjanssen @DOualaalou @lajohnstondr @PSTAsiatech richturrin.substack.com/p/ch…