Alfonso Gómez-Jordana on Why Every AI Agent Will Need a Wallet

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
We're here with Alfonso of Crossmint. Alfonso, welcome back to the show, man. It's a pleasure.

**Alfonso Gómez-Jordana** (0:07)
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me again.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:10)
Absolutely, man. Well, I know we've talked about several things. You guys at Crossmint are doing great work. Most recently, I believe you guys have a partnership with Mastercard and also around this AI agent payment framework. So we wanna talk all about it. Before we get into the Mastercard partnership, just give us a little bit of...
You know, has this been your primary focus? Get us caught up on what's been going on in your world since the last time we had you on the show.

**Alfonso Gómez-Jordana** (0:38)
Yeah, absolutely. I think just 10 seconds, but Crossmint is a infrastructure company in the programmatic finance space. Most of the work we do is on stable coins, actually, stable coin enablement. And I would say they are the majority of the things that we see going on in our company, like fintechs on the remittance space or neobanks, things like that, that are starting to enable stable coins. However, a lot of our product development and where we see the future going is all on agentic finance. And so, yeah, on our end, since last we spoke, we've been rolling out better support for what's called scope cards or agentic cards, Mastercard announcement. We also announced something with American Express recently.
And yeah, lots of things to talk about there. But I would say we're seeing progress all over the place.
Not only agentic finance, but I think there's also a lot of stable coin enablement happening in the world and trying to somehow do all those things together.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:38)
Very cool, man. Very cool. So before we get into some of the nuts and bolts about how this integration works, just what is it like? You're going in, you're talking to Mastercard, you're talking to American Express.
I'm sure they get pitched a million times, AI payments, AI agents, stable coins or something that they've been talking about. Why are they taking you serious? What is it about Crossmint, that American Express and Mastercard? What is it that you bring to the table for these companies?

**Alfonso Gómez-Jordana** (2:10)
Well, I think in a way, what I would say is every major financial player is trying to make sure they're up to date and remain relevant with all these transitions that are happening. There's one on the stable coin side, another one is on agentic payments. On the Crossmint side, we've just been doing specifically agentic payments now for around two years.
We've been gathering a lot of developer attention, so we've been useful to these companies to help them bring last mile the thoughts and technologies they have into the hands of developers. So we've been a good partner in terms of giving them developer feedback, actually getting the first payment outs and things like this. And in a way, we're basically the glue between ultimately indie developers or the developer on the street and the car network companies.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:06)
Very cool, very cool. And so, yeah, how does this integration work?
I believe OpenClaw is something that you guys are helping to enable the payment network between OpenClaw. Near, our sponsor of this AI show has announced IronClaw, which helps tighten up a lot of the security around these agents. And so yeah, talk us through Lobster Cash, talk us through the Mastercard, Agent Pay. Tell us how this integration works.

**Alfonso Gómez-Jordana** (3:36)
Yeah.
So, let's see. So maybe for folks to help understand the different layers and what's happening. First, I'll explain the end thing that, the end experience that Mastercard and all these car companies are trying to achieve. The problem everyone is trying to solve is if in the future, the majority of your purchases online are intermediate by an AI agent. Let's say you tell an AI agent automatically to the groceries for me every week based on my nutrition plan or what have you, or figure out my trip to Europe and buy everything on my behalf, is how can an agent securely take payment method, specifically your credit card, and go and purchase online without screwing up, causing a lot of incorrect purchases, leaking the data, etc. So this is the problem that everyone is trying to solve. Now, how is this problem getting solved? At the card network layer, each of these companies, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, are rolling out initial protocols or standards that allow an AI agent to request a scope card based off your existing credit card. So let's say you have a Capital One card that has a $10,000 credit line.