When AI Agents Start Spending Your Money | Alex Rampell & Terry Angelos

Terry Angelos (0:01)

In the last three months, we've had this huge leap from agents being what I would call spectators, to agents being actors, because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials.

Alex Rampell (0:11)

Amazon recently blocked Muse. And there are many reasons for this. You can either be antagonistic to agented commerce or you can be highly receptive.

Terry Angelos (0:21)

What's happened with the rise of Muse and Instinct is once they have access to payment credentials, their utility increases. So we sort of have kicked off what I kind of call the wallet wars, where every wallet is now rushing to connect to the agents.

Alex Rampell (0:38)

Everybody who's listening to this podcast, I almost guarantee you have a credential that's stored at VGS.

Terry Angelos (0:43)

The largest online merchants, the largest neobanks and the largest frontier labs all use VGS to secure payment credentials.

Alex Rampell (0:51)

It's a really formidable position to be in. Where do you think VGS is going to go?

Terry Angelos (0:56)

I think we're...

SPEAKER_3 (0:58)

AI agents are moving from recommending what you should buy to actually buying it for you. That creates a deceptively hard question. How do you safely give an AI access to your money?

In this episode, Pay16z general partner Alex Rampell sits down with VGS Chief Strategy Officer Terry Angelos to unpack the emergency payment infrastructure behind agentic commerce. They discuss the new wallet wars, how payment credentials could move safely between consumers, agents, and merchants, and why new agentic tokens could allow AI to transact without breaking the protections consumers already expect from credit cards.

They also get into what happens when an agent buys the wrong thing, why some merchants may actively resist agentic commerce, and how the economics of everything from credit card rewards to subscriptions could change when an AI is constantly optimizing on the consumer's behalf. Because giving agents the ability to spend doesn't just make them more useful. It could reshape who controls the customer relationship itself.

Alex Rampell (2:01)

Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Rampell, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and I'm here joined by Terry Angelos. I'm very excited about being joined by Terry, because Terry and I started a company called Trial Pay in 2006, long, long time ago, 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_3 (2:15)

20 years ago.

Terry Angelos (2:16)

Alex looked very different.

Alex Rampell (2:17)

Yes. You look the same. I think you're insulting me and I'm complimenting you and hopefully not the other way around. But today, this is the really cool part. One of my first investments here was a company called VGS, which stands for Very Good Security. Some people might not get that's actually a pun or a joke, because one of the most famous cryptography companies was called PGP, which is Pretty Good Privacy.

And obviously, it's very good privacy. It's not just Pretty Good Privacy, it's incredible privacy, it's unbreakable privacy because it's very hard to factor very large composite numbers into their primes, and Pretty Good Privacy is actually very good. So that was kind of the original name for Very Good Security. I led this investment a long time ago. Trial pay got bought by Visa.

Visa, under your leadership, invested in VGS, and now you're back. And you're the chief strategy officer and board member alongside me at VGS.

Terry Angelos (3:07)

Yeah, it's been a very fun and incredible journey. And I think if you look at VGS today, it's a payment infrastructure business. We secure credentials for about a third of all e-commerce by GMV.

And we have the largest online merchants, we have the largest neobanks, and the largest frontier labs all use VGS to secure payment credentials. And I think today, part of the reason why we want to talk about agentic commerce is because VGS is involved in helping agents get those credentials, helping wallets hand those credentials to agents, and also to merchants who have to receive these credentials. So we're sort of in the middle of these really interesting conversations and handovers between credentials.

Alex Rampell (3:53)

But maybe we should dig into what a credential is. I mean, credential is a fancy way of saying a credit card for lay people. I guess a little more complicated than that when you really dig into it. But you work with, I don't know which merchants I'm allowed to say that you work with. You work with all the big ones, but like, why don't we take an example merchant that you work with kind of pre-AI, pre-agentic commerce and just explain what you do. Like, why do they use VGS? What do they use you for and how pervasive is it?

Terry Angelos (4:18)