Visa announced this week that AI agents can now use credit cards. Mastercard launched a protocol for AI-to-AI payments and micropayments. Catena Labs raised $30M and filed for a national trust bank charter to build an "AI-native bank."
The agent payment wars are officially live.
But if you look past the headlines, the real story isn't about competition between payment networks. It's about a structural mismatch between legacy financial infrastructure and autonomous systems — and what it actually takes to solve it.
The Identity Gap No One's Talking About
Here's the problem: AI agents can't open bank accounts.
