Lithic

Our Head of Risk and Compliance, Yuliya Kazakevich, is joining a panel on one of the hardest open questions in fintech right now: who is accountable when an AI agent initiates a payment? She will be in conversation with Alex Johnson from Fintech Takes, Ross Freiman-Mendel from Persona, and Drew Edmond from Glenbrook Partners, talking through liability, governance, and what it means to manage risk in agentic commerce before regulators weigh in. Register to join the conversation: https://lnkd.in/gme2kNEV

Lithic is built to be the programmable card issuing infrastructure technology companies rely on to launch and scale. That means continuously expanding the options available to our clients. Our new sponsor bank partnership with Byline Bank gives companies a faster path to launch consumer and commercial card programs with a banking partner built for fintech speed. 

Banks and fintechs are working through a real legal tension right now: The Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to assess customer risk. Recent executive action discouraging debanking pushes them not to turn customers away. Banks are figuring out how to satisfy both at once, and no formal standards or safe harbors exist yet for the higher-risk activities now being encouraged. On top of that, the current opening to new activities could look very different under a future administration, so an open door today might become a trap tomorrow. So, get the documentation, staffing, and technology plan right. Take today's opportunities without building practices so rigid they slow you down, while preparing for expectations to drift back toward the center over time.

AI agents are starting to spend money on our behalf. The real question isn't whether they'll pay. It's how we keep that spend safe. Our CPO, Robin Gandhi, talked to PYMNTS about why virtual cards are becoming the control layer for agentic payments: single use, limited by amount, merchant, and time, so a mistake or a hallucination never turns into a real loss. And the most interesting use case isn't a shopping bot. It's B2B, where agents can take on the necessary, rules-based spend businesses already understand. Read the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gfTnEDSg

Showing a cardholder their own card number has always meant a tradeoff. Either you stay out of PCI scope and accept a rigid, prebuilt card visual, or you spend the time to a unique experience and pull sensitive data through your own systems. Neither is a choice you would make gladly. Lithic’s modernized Card Embed functionality means you no longer have to. Programs can now style cards and customize info placement while the card data stays in our scope, not yours. Learn more about how ambitious programs are creating compliant, thoughtful card experiences: https://hubs.li/Q04qzc7b0

AI agents are already shopping and paying on behalf of consumers, and banks, fintechs, and card networks each have a stake in defining who they trust to power those transactions. On July 29th, our Head of Risk and Compliance, Yuliya Kazakevich, joins Alex Johnson from Fintech Takes, Ross Freiman-Mendel from Persona, and Drew Edmond from Glenbrook Partners to unpack what it takes to build that trust layer: identity for non-human customers, who owns liability, and what separates the fintechs poised to lead this shift from the ones playing catch-up. Register below to join the conversation!

Money is about to move across more settlement systems than ever, Fed master accounts, blockchains, bank rails, and infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. At fintech_devcon, Declan Callisto, Senior Product Manager at Lithic, will share what it takes to build a ledger layer ready for all of it. → Wednesday, August 5 at 2pm MT → Why most ledgers break (and how to build one that handles it all) He'll make the case for building a ledger that scales with payments, not architecture that gets rebuilt every time they shift. Register now: https://fintechdevcon.io/

Compliance obligations shouldn't require a separate vendor and data pipeline just to keep up with fraud. Transaction Monitoring runs natively on Lithic, giving risk teams direct control over how flagging, case routing, and resolution work, without waiting on an engineering sprint to change a rule. We put together three click-through demos showing exactly how it works: building a tagging rule, setting when a case opens, and managing a case end to end. Take a look and see what direct control over your program's risk actually looks like in practice: https://hubs.li/Q04qbbwZ0 #Fintech #CardIssuing #FraudPrevention #AuthorizationIntelligence 

KYC appears in no statute or regulation anywhere. It's industry shorthand, and plenty of people who use it daily don't fully agree on what it covers. KYC spans two separate things: 1. Customer identification, which confirms who someone is 2. Customer due diligence, which weighs the risk they carry. The due diligence half is where it collides with the debanking debate. Current pressure points banks and fintechs toward risk decisions made customer by customer, instead of shutting out an entire sector at once. Due diligence also has to be ongoing, a real challenge when customer activity shifts by the day. One gut check for teams building financial products: can you say, cleanly, where your customer identification ends and your due diligence begins? If the two blur together, that's usually where risk decisions get sloppy. Watch or listen the full episode at the link in the comments below.

Happy Tuesday to all those who celebrate and thank you for supporting my posts! Don't forget to "smash that like button" 🙂 And now, more on Stablecoins. I can't stop thinking about Mario running through a sea of coins when this topic comes up. Am I the only one (usually the case with me). Stablecoins are not showing up at your local Starbucks. You are not paying for groceries with USDC. The barista is not accepting crypto. None of that is happening at scale — and that is not the point (so far). The real story is happening somewhere most people never look. Not at the checkout counter. Underneath it. Last week: Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform — a single environment for banks and fintechs to mint, manage, and settle stablecoins. The Federal Reserve System published findings concluding stablecoins complement traditional banking and lower cross-border costs. The American Bankers Association published a cover story with a direct message to every bank: the era of passive observation is over. Visa. The Federal Reserve. The ABA. Same week. All saying the same thing. The conversation has officially moved from if to how. The problem with traditional settlement Banking rails operate Monday through Friday during business hours. Settlement takes 1-3 days. Weekends and holidays, nothing moves. Capital sits idle waiting for Monday morning. For a global, 24/7 digital economy, that is a meaningful constraint. The two models Model 1 — Stablecoin-funded cards. Cardholder holds stablecoins, converts to fiat at point of sale. Merchant receives fiat. Identical consumer experience to a regular debit card — but the funding source is on-chain. Model 2 — Stablecoin settlement. Cardholder has no idea stablecoins are involved. They swipe a regular card. Transaction authorizes normally. But on the back end, settlement between the issuer and the card network happens in USDC instead of a wire transfer. Faster. Cheaper. Seven days a week. Model 2 is quietly reshaping the infrastructure of global payments right now. No consumer behavior change. No merchant integration. Just better plumbing. What actually changes Stablecoins settle on blockchain rails that never close. No weekend gaps. A payment that used to wait until Monday morning can now settle in minutes on a Sunday night. The checkout experience stays the same. What changes is everything you never see. Where Lithic fits At Lithic, we are actively having these conversations with bank partners and card programs. The infrastructure we have built — programmable tokens, real-time decisioning, flexible bank partnerships — is exactly what stablecoin-funded card programs will need as this market matures. Stablecoin settlement doesn't replace the card program. It upgrades the rails underneath it. More next week — Cleared. #008: Stablecoins vs. Tokenized Deposits (thanks for the suggestion Claire J.) #Cleared #Payments #Fintech #Stablecoins #Settlement #CardIssuing #GENIUSAct #Lithic