Jerry Lu

Natural Direct is now live. Agents are becoming real participants in the economy. That means being able to move money as freely as people and businesses do. With Direct, your agents can now pay anyone, any way they need to be paid: ACH, Wire, and Realtime (powered by RTP and FedNow) with mailed paper checks, international wire, and more coming soon. Same @naturalpay wallets, same controls, the right rail programmatically chosen by your agent at runtime*

J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, and other major U.S. banks are beginning to block AI agents. I think that is going to be one of the most consequential decisions they make for their balance sheets and ability to endure. I wrote about why agents will fundamentally reshape banking, how money moves, and which institutions win over the next decade. natural.com/blog/banks-agent…

Natural is rolling out a full-stack PSP over the next few weeks, allowing agents to accept payments via voice, payment links, or programmatically. If you're interested in getting early access shoot me a DM

Testing out one of @naturalpay's new products by making the first ever agentic angel investment. Direct gives agents the ability to choose a specific payment rail at runtime. Coming soon

Today, @sarxhxu is joining our marketing team at @naturalpay from Cognition. We’ve been recruiting to add to our marketing team for a while, but I’ve been incredibly selective. It’s tricky to find someone who can marry technical marketing, product marketing, brand, and storytelling. Sarah is one of the few people I’ve met who has that combination. Increasingly, you’re seeing decision-making shift from humans to agents. Whether that’s procuring software, booking restaurants, or moving money. What happens when our job is no longer putting up billboards targeting founders in San Francisco, but instead getting your Muse agent to choose Natural? That’s Sarah’s job. At the same time, I want to be driving towards that future because of how much more human the world can become, not towards some dystopian, hyper-technological future where technology becomes the point. That’s an ethos Sarah and I share. It’s going to be an exciting year ahead. Natural is about to enter its most consequential four quarters. There’s a massive wave coming, and either we paddle fast enough to catch it or we don’t. Either way, we’ve spent the last year preparing for what we believe will be the most dramatic change in financial services in decades. Very excited to have Sarah here for it. natural.com/blog/why-sarah-j…

I am having all of these conversations, so let me tell you what is about to happen in banking over the next few years. There are roughly ~4,000 banks in the US, and the vast majority still run on legacy cores like FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry. These systems were not built for modern programmatic banking, let alone agentic payments, where the entire financial stack needs to be exposed through programmable surfaces. Agents are going to accelerate consolidation across banking. They will route activity toward financial institutions that are the most programmable, the easiest to integrate with, and offer the most rational economics. Unlike humans, agents do not care about branches, brand affinity, or decades-old banking relationships. That creates enormous pressure on both ends of the market. Across both G-SIBs and the long tail of regional and community banks, deposits, payment volume, and eventually credit activity will increasingly concentrate around a much smaller number of institutions built to support programmatic financial activity. The result will be significant compression in bank balance sheets and payment volume across the industry, accelerating consolidation and, in some cases, bank failures. The banking system was built around human distribution. Agents are going to reprice that distribution advantage very quickly.