Sam Boboev: AI Will Eat Fintech In 2026 (How To Position)

Transcript

All right, let's bring up Sam. Talk about the agentic economy and more. Should be a good good conversation. Sam, welcome to the show. Good to have you, buddy. How are you? >> Hey Andy. Hey Rob. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great. Thanks. >> Absolutely. It's great to see you here. Sam, it's been a hell of a few weeks here. There's plenty for us to talk about agentic economy, fintech, and the crackdown on the frontier models. Maybe you could just give us a quick background on yourselves and you know, some of the things you're most excited about before we dig into some of the nuts and bolts here.

>> Sure. Sure. Thank you for having me again. Sam. So, by profession I'm product manager. You guys you know, I've been building in fintech industry for the like I don't know past 8 years. Had a chance to build wallets and card issuing. And at the same time I'm always analyzing what's happening in the market, learning more, and recently with the recent AI developments I'm diving deeper into agentic economy, agentic payments, agentic commerce, and what's happening there. Currently working on my own project analytics and media platform fintech wrap up where I cover all these topics including AI payments AI and stablecoins and payments in general.

>> Yeah, beautiful Sam. I mean I've been a big fan of your show and of your work. I've seen you all over on YouTube and LinkedIn and everywhere else and you know, it seems like you've you've got a really really strong background in understanding kind of like the nuts and bolts of fintech. We kind of come at this space from a different lens. We're kind of more like we want to bring all of the nuts and bolts and bells and whistles of the on-chain economy into the fintech landscape. Kind of this distribution play, this what they call like this D5 mullet play.

We're kind of now also then entering this agentic world where it's also going to be a big part of how fintech and blockchain interact. So, maybe you could just like start high-level here and we can have an understanding of what your broader thesis is for the intersection of these three technologies, fintech, blockchain, and AI or agentic kind of commerce, and what you are seeing right now as the convergence between these three. >> Yeah, guys, as I as my background is in fintech, let me start with the fintech first, you know, in the before this everything that around AI started, we were talking about payments and the

cross-border and how to optimize ledgers, how to optimize transactions, and everything around it. Once we start having frontier model models, basically literally everything changed, you know. Now everywhere AI is everywhere. We want to be AI everywhere, to use it everywhere. However, it doesn't seem to be as easy as seem as it seems because when we talk about fintech or finance in general, it's regulated environment. You cannot just simply come and start implementing AI or start integrating AI products into into into into your products if you are a bank or payment service provider or fintech, you have to ensure that you match the regulation requirements of the regulators in the

market. But at the moment it seems to be nobody still understands how to implement AI correctly into financial services, you know. Yeah, we can do customer support. Yeah, we can answer your questions. So, we can do analysis for you. We can show insights how you are doing, how you're spending. But when it comes to our broader tag, okay, now I want to trade. Really, can I do that? Or now let's allow AI to make to make purchase on your behalf. Okay, can we do that? What if AI orders not one but 10 or thousand, let's say shoes when you say go order that? Who's responsible? And one of the open questions in my opinion at the

moment is like who's liable if AI makes a mistake. And this is one of the important topics of agentic commerce, I would say. Everyone wants to go there, everyone wants to do it, but nobody still understands who owns liability. And if we converge blockchain and crypto in this world into this world, we understand that stable coins are I mean native currency for AI or at least AI agents because one of the advantages of stable coins, they are first of all programmable. And again, you can make micro transactions using stable coins. This is one of the biggest advantages stable coins have and what AI agents can do with stable coins

is just basically go and let's say use stable coins for subscription economy or go and do micro transactions to let's say buy tokens on your behalf if you allow them. And you know, when we talk about agentic commerce, one of the first use cases is for developers especially go and buy tokens or some services using stable coins and you can automate those with AI because again, there are rules within the companies, especially if you're talking about developers, those are usually within the companies, especially big corps, there are rules that you can set up and you can easily and safely use AI agents to make on your

behalf. So these are my views so far. >> Yeah. Sam, I've got maybe a more general question zooming out a little bit because you know, you and I and and all of us like here, we are in the weeds, right? Like we're talking about this every day, we're we're learning, we're researching, we're digging in and we get into some of the very nuanced, you know, solutions for some of these, you know, back uh maybe, you know, underneath the hood sort of, uh solutions. >> Right. >> Do Do you think And And so, you know, for a consumer, I go, you know, down to the cafe, I want to buy a cup of coffee, I take out my phone, I tap my phone, I just put in my password or my

fingerprint, it's all very, very easy right now, without AI, right? >> Yeah. >> And so, for the normal person, fintech is easy. Like, I just take out my phone, I tap my phone, I use the thing. It's so It, you know, we've already innovated from the credit card and checks and, right, we've come so far already. It's so much so much more convenient. Do you think with AI, we're going to make the consumer experience any better? Like, what is there to improve on the consumer experience? Or, do you think almost all of the improvements are going to be made on business-to-business workflows?

>> Um that's great question. I think Let's Let's talk short-term. Let's talk what's happening at the moment, then I will go into the future. If we talk about right now, what I can see that and I have a chat with chief operating officer of Chime, and what they are doing, for example, with AI, they are implementing AI, so they are launching their own assistant within the Chime application. And in the first place, what it does that, again, as I mentioned, it provides you customer support. Let's say, you made a payment, uh for some reason, it didn't go through or you don't understand what's happening with your money, it's gone, you made a purchase, you didn't receive the delivery, but the money is also not there. So, you go and ask and it provides you answers. Detailed, it will

try you direct and provide you more insights on what you can do. The second use case at the moment is I see in most of the use cases is insights. Well, uh what am I spending on my money? Um am I within the budget that I set, for example? Or, you can go and ask your AI agent to create a budget for you and to help you to stay within that budget if you are overspending or you are not spending enough or whatever that your goal is. And very recently, this is the third trend that I I am watching now. You must have heard Robinhood and then later on Coinbase that they said like we now allow you to integrate your own agents, be it cloud for example, maybe ChatGPT as well. And then you can tell

them to trade on your behalf. And Robinhood also launched its own card basically for AI agents particularly. So, it's card for AI agents where you can set up your limits. You can tell what to spend on, how much, when, and etc. and etc. to protect you and just in case from overspending and AI helps net. You never know, right? So, they they launched these products. Maybe now we are going into wealth management, a bit, trading, a bit, where now customers can tell their AI agents to do trading for them. But the thing is I said Coinbase and Robinhood allow you to integrate your own AI agents. They don't say like we built one for you, use this.

So, you have to bring your own AI. Just take this into account. So, they are very cautious, you know. If they create their own AI within the application and if they it makes a mistake, that's very terrible. But if you bring your own AI, you know, it's your AI. You made a mistake. We just we just we just gave you tools. So, you had to take care of that. So, basically, this is the this is the case. But moving forward, if I look into the future, um I'm very optimistic that AI will come and help you to make pro purchases, especially with subscriptions. It will help you to manage those. But in your day-to-day operations, in your day-to-day purchases, let's say you go and buy a coffee. Um I don't know how it

can help you. I've no idea how Well, I mean, or you do go groceries. What AI I do? Okay, yes, it can tell you, yeah, you have this list of groceries you have to buy, and then beyond that I'm not sure just yet how it can help you. That's why I said now the main one of the main use cases for agentic commerce or agentic AI is that you just to go and buy tokens and this type of stuff in B2B economy more. If you're a developer within the company, it's a way easier because you have policies, you have rules, limits that you can do and you cannot do. But in day-to-day commerce, you will still mainly rely on AI, in my opinion, at least short term, just to do

the search, to understand, to compare, then you go and make the purchase, the final purchase yourself. >> Yeah. Uh new type of niche assets can imagine the crazy new AI laws when it comes with coordinating with Apple Pay and convincing Apple Inc. that I can't that I can use my custom agent within their IP, right? It's going to be a lot of these interesting dynamics of people wanting to use their own local AI for data sharing reasons or uh a better model from a certain provider who's uh potentially competitive with a fintech provider who has a deal with a different provider, etc., etc. Um you know, Sam, what one of the things that I think our audience is going to be most interested in is from this kind of fintech

investing angle, we had this, you know, kind of like decentralized AI bull thesis episode last week talking about, you know, the likes of BitTensor and NEAR and Venice and a lot of these kind of like crypto assets that are building like decentralized training, decentralized inference, doing a lot of these different things uh in a more open-source distributed manner rather than like in a closed-source frontier model lab way. But in a similar sense, when it comes to the fintech adoption of AI and using agentic payments, building the agentic economy, who who is set to win the most here, right? Let's say we get you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of

agents operating on chain or off chain in the kind of more fintech economy. Who wins here? Is is there a type of company? Is there a provider? Is there an issuer, a service provider? Like what is the broader thesis of who's going to capture a lot of the value from this, whether public company, private company etc.? >> Well, it's very hard to say. To be to be completely honest, it's very hard to say, but in my opinion, the companies that have huge customer base are definitely winning the race because, you know, one of the things that those companies have is data.

So, they have a lot of data and on the other hand, they have a lot of resources. One great example is I will speak in terms of, for example, UK, where I am based now, and Revolut. For example, in my opinion, in comparison to smaller or new fintechs that come into the market, Revolut has huge advantage because it has huge customer base, 75 million users who are using Revolut, and then they consequently has a lot of data that customers are producing on their platform. So, they can use that data to create AI agents speci- specifically for their customers, and then maybe in the future outsource that AI agents to other companies because we see that Revolut is

doing this. Some They first launching some products for themselves, and then later on, for example, their HR platform, they first created it for themselves, then they outsource it to to the market, and now they're selling it. So, what they can do now that they can create AI agents first for themselves, they can train, use it, uh basically create the best version of it, and then start selling it to third-party providers. So, in my opinion, user um companies that has a huge customer base are going to win relatively to smaller ones. Again, I could be wrong here because again, um there could be a fintech or even a company at the intersection of AI and fintech. So, they could start as an AI first and then go into the fintech. Uh

we one example is ChatGPT or OpenAI. They recently integrated with Plaid. So, now you can basically bring your uh transactional banking information into your ChatGPT and I believe it can do analysis for you and then provide you detailed information, etc., etc. And once we have proper regulation in place, what OpenAI potentially can do is that they can now start launching their own financial solutions. Who knows? Who knows? They can potentially do that. I mean, if they have resources and right regulation in place, they can easily do that because we can see they're buying a lot of financial companies and they say we want to be super application. And if you want to be super application, you

must have some sort of a financial solution. Otherwise, it will be quite challenging. So, again, um bigger companies with large customer base uh going to lead, but uh let's see how that goes. >> Yeah. You know, one of the things that caught my attention last week was that uh MasterCard and and you know, Visa is is partnering with them as well and they're the credit card companies are pushing these initiatives to partner with the AI companies so that they are the primary primary mode for agents to spend uh you know, in agentic marketplaces. And so, they call this thing called Agent Pay, uh you know, which is a service designed uh for businesses to offer services that agents can use to buy and sell.

And so, that kind of got me thinking and I know you know, we kind of primarily look at this from the digital assets perspective. This didn't necessarily seem like it was leveraging blockchain technology or stable coins. Although, you know, MasterCard and Visa have their stable coin strategies as well. >> Yeah. >> Given that you are sort of on the you're sort of in the middle of a lot of these intersecting areas. >> Right. >> From your perspective, do you see these fintech companies really adopting blockchain and digital assets or does it is it kind of still like cringe?

Like, you know, they don't really need it. Stable coins and blockchains, you know, the credit card companies work fine. Agents work fine. Like you know, when I hear you talking about how these things are going to need to be, you know, interacting with one another, it seems like blockchain is a perfect solution. But, I'm curious from your perspective, how important do you think blockchain is to the overall fintech complex? >> Um Rob, I would say blockchain is very important. And these two companies, these two giants are in blockchain game, you know. MasterCard recently acquired BPNK, a blockchain infrastructure provider for 1.8 billion dollars, you know. Uh it means they want to be in this game and they understand that it's

very critical for them to be in this game. You know, their strategy is usually like this. There is a new technology in finance, there is a new technology in AI, we have to be there. We don't want to be left out. So, with um basically MasterCard agent based solution, what they are doing is they are saying we're creating machine payments where we don't need humans. So, basically they are um stitching this into their DNA, which means so MasterCard will start offering solutions where you can set the limits, you can create cards particularly for AI agents, and you can if you read the news, they say now you can spend stable coins, and we have basically infrastructure for that. You can use our infrastructure to allow your AI agents

to spend stable coins. And the same applies for Visa. They partnered up with um OpenAI. Uh last week they announced that and uh again, they want to also be in this game, and they they have their own agent that went in terms of stable coins, and they also are processing up to If I If I remember correctly, they say 7 plus billion dollars in stable coins, which is quite good number, and the numbers are increasing. So, these two giants are always there. They always want to be in this game, and uh let's say If you say blockchain going to disrupt this, trust me, they will be there. They won't be left out. They will be part of it. And if I talk about AI economy, so

what Visa and MasterCard trying to be, they want to be, in addition to be a network, they still want to be a network using stable coins or any other uh types of a blockchain solution. Also, they want to be a trust layer. So, what they say Um okay, guys, cool. Um there are AI agents. Um we want to ensure they spend money correctly. We want to ensure that they are reliable. Uh and they do the right thing. So, we will go and uh verify all of this through our solutions. They have different solutions. Each of them have different solutions for that. And we will still be the trust layer between all of you, because again, we are well connected. We are available almost in all the

countries around the world. We have resources. We have connections to banks as well as consumers. So, use us. So, this is the strategy they are using at the moment. >> Yeah. And then, on that note, specifically, Sam, when when it comes to the payment side, do you think that these card companies Have they Have they accepted that stable coins will be a a payment mechanism for agents? Or what is the discourse in your circles around what [snorts] changes are going to be required from the fintech kind of you know, Goliaths or the payment networks as it pertains to agents. Like, what is the broad discourse around the changes

to these financial services companies that are going to be required due to the influx of AI? >> First thing they understand is that they AI agents will be spending not like human. You [snorts] know, as I said, most of the transactions are done by agents are micro transactions. So, what these two giants or any other payment processor are doing that they want to integrate into blockchain rails. And again, as you said, one of the best ways of doing that is through stable coins. That's why as I said, for example, MasterCard acquired BVNK and we should expect more consolidation in stable coin market in my opinion. There will be more acquisitions because at one

point Coinbase, they also showed some interest to acquire BVNK. Initially, MasterCard said they will acquire Zero Hash at one point, but the deal didn't go through. So, these guys truly understand what's happening with in the AI economy and how AI agents will work and they want to be as I said early on in this game and they want to stay relevant as a rail. They don't they don't want to go and develop much of the things themselves. They will be rather um providers for let's say banks, AI companies on one hand, and FinTechs if they want and need tools that that will help them um to grow in AI economy and to win the competition. So,

they say like a come, we have tools, use our tool, use our rails, and please go grow because if you grow, we will grow because you will use our rails to make transactions and we will make it money out of that. >> Yeah. And and this is the same sort of growth model that we've seen from blockchain companies, growth companies in general have have used this to bootstrap and generate network effects to lead to scale. And and so on on this note, as we're thinking through the adoption curve of these agentic commerce payment methods, the machine-to-machine economy, stable coins and blockchains as part of this, again, the consumer doesn't really seem like they will have very much proactive ex- like differences or changes to their experience. And

because there is this trust gap, it seems as if it's going to be an uphill battle to try to get consumers to adopt stable coins or some of these new methods. But what I'm realizing is that, you know, maybe they don't have to, right? Maybe the machine-to-machine economy, these agents, we'll just tell our agent like, "Hey, you know, I have this card, right? Say it's a debit card or credit card via MasterCard or Visa." Then it seems like MasterCard or Visa could they could decide, "Hey, the machine wanted to pay for this thing. I, MasterCard or Visa, needs to settle with the merchant bank account."

>> Exactly. >> If it doesn't matter to the consumer, then MasterCard and Visa can choose to settle via stable coins with the merchant bank account. Do they have the latitude to make the decision to say, "Hey, if I if it's okay with the merchant, I'm going to send the merchant stable coins. The consumer doesn't care, right?" So, will Do you think we'll see a lot of this stable coin adoption happen behind the behind the merchant, like behind the point of sale, so that, you know, the agent they go out, they do something, and then it's between Visa and MasterCard and the and the merchant to ultimately decide. And maybe it's not even the merchant, right? If I'm just buying from a mom and pop, they're selling me a, you know, a shirt or something, right? They might not care

stable coins or fiat, right? But it's between the merchant's bank and Visa and MasterCard. And if it's more efficient for them to settle via stable coins for agentic transactions, then it will be up to them to do so. They don't need the consumer or the merchant to opt in. Is that Is that right? Th- >> is this is exactly the case and the first use case in payments or I would say one of the biggest use cases of stablecoin in payments is like for settlements. Exactly. And as you said, in your day-to-day payments you really don't care. I mean, you What you care is like you make you want to make a payment and then get the good or service. That's it. In the background, you don't care what what's happening, what rails, what settlement. You don't even know. Most of

the people 90% of people they don't understand what settlement is. They understand they are making a payment with a card. Payment went through. They got their coffee. That's it. And at the moment most of the um transactions in stablecoin is in the background. So basically everyone saying is stablecoins are rails just like everything else ACH and others. So those are rails. Those are mostly for settlement. One use case you might care is in cross-border, of course, because again it's cheaper. So let's say you are doing a remittance, you are sending money abroad. At that point you might care. Yes, because again stablecoins are relatively I would say relatively cheaper and relatively faster. And as a merchant one thing that you would care when it comes to

stablecoin and again it's about settlement. How fast How fast that your transaction or your money settles and you get access to it. If you use stablecoin it's quite fast rather than like waiting for batch transaction to T+1, T+2, etc. You don't have to wait for those type types of stuff and because again stablecoins and blockchain 24/7 available so you might get access faster to your to your own money. But other than that that I mean, it's like you don't you really don't care. You just make a payment. That's it.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that kind of like like like like the bull thesis for this like DeFi mullet idea of of of kind of stablecoins or blockchains underneath but these really, you know, strongly developed fintech applications on top as you said, with a lot of customer base or a large customer base like Revolut and some of these others. You know, Sam, I'm curious, from the investing perspective, how are you How are you expressing your bullishness on the fintech adoption of stable coins and of AI systems, as well as the, you know, growing trend of of the fintech world kind of colliding with the blockchain world? From an investing perspective, no you know, not financial advice, but how

are you expressing your belief in these trends, whether in the public markets, private markets, through your work? How do you How do you express this bullishness? >> Uh as you said, no fi- not financial advice right? >> Yeah, yeah. [laughter] >> Yeah, um no, guys, I'm I'm really bullish on this. Why? Uh because AI is huge. Um first, it was just gen AI uh using in a day-to-day work. Now, we have agentic AI, which uh now you allow your AI agents to do everything on your behalf, right? Moving forward, it will be purchases as well. And if we say agentic AI is the future, then I highly believe that stable coins will be the future as well. And I wouldn't say the fintech world is clashing with

blockchain world. They are I mean, the fintech world is pro blockchain. They want to adopt it because they also understand that the future is the blockchain, the future is um stable coin, especially as I said, they understand that the AI is the future. So, more and more companies and more and more governments, I would say, for example, the UK is also working in that direction, uh go and adopt their own stable coin. They will develop uh stable coins in local currencies. Now, 99% of stable coins are USD. So, hopefully, there will be GBP and euro stable coins soon.

Um I'm pro bullish uh and I'm looking at different companies and different solutions. Hopefully, we'll get to the point where we will fully trust AI agents to make transactions. Even though we are early stage, but this will happen at some point in my opinion. >> And Sam, I'm curious like, you know, there because there's so many disruptive technologies happening here, we could see how machine-to-machine, you know, agentic payments could, you know, as we think further out and and tend to imagine these things, right? Like robots and humanoids tend to get involved and all of a sudden this thing gets very weird and very, you know, very very creative. And so, I'm curious, what is what are some of your bold predictions?

Do you have any hot takes as you kind of think out into the future? Like how do you think the agentic commerce is going to be disruptive and just generally any any bold predictions for fintech over the next few years as it converges with AI? >> Well, you know, I always try to avoid making any predictions. Yeah, but I will try to be general. I don't have any one particular opinion about the next stage of disruption, but definitely we're going to see more and more companies to converge with AI and to launch some sort of AI product. I'm talking mostly about fintech vertical, banking vertical, launch some sort of

AI solution where now you can, for example, just like Coinbase or Robinhood, you can bring your AI own AI agents and give them the cards to use on your behalf or let's say they will launch their own agents to help you basically to do the stuff. But the the overall idea, the overall vision that I have, at one point maybe every company will be AI company. Who >> Yeah, it certainly seems that way. And and so, predictions are difficult. I totally understand. We we you know, face that as well. Is there a particular use case? Like something that you would use yourself? Like that doesn't exist in the market right now, but you would be really really excited if a company built this.

>> Well, let let let let me say this. There's not I wouldn't say this doesn't exist, but that would be great to have AI agents that would go I think it it already exists, but I would have it would be great if it's more personalized to help me with my subscriptions because sometimes I make subscription and literally forget it. Yeah. So because sometimes you know, I make subscription subscription just to test, but I forget to cancel it. So it would be great like to get AI agency inside every maybe application payment application or financial application that I use that would help me to manage this correctly and then give me the insights. But these services already exist, but I'm looking

forward to what else AI agents can do. The only thing that I am still waiting I wouldn't say this is product, but rather regulation, you know, how this is going to work out. This is I'm really curious about this because at the moment the market is going forward. We are developing I mean a lot of products especially in financial verticals as well. But trust me at one point regulation will catch up and then we will start so many of them die out. I mean products they will die out because again they do not meet the requirements of the regulators and then only the strongest ones will survive. So I am more curious about the regulation at the moment.

>> Yeah. And we're already seeing that that happen with the US you know, sort of nerfing the metaverse with the US. >> Yeah, that happened actually. That was really interesting use case. Let's see how that will evolve. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Same. I'm curious who are some of the you know, where can our audience find you and who you know, what are some of the best interviews you've ever done on on on on your show? >> Yeah, guys, the best place to find me is first of all LinkedIn. Just go and type Sam Boboev. My surname is hard to say, but >> [laughter] >> yeah, guys, try and on I am live on LinkedIn and X as well.

Just go type wrap up on YouTube, uh, sorry, on YouTube to find my podcast and on X just type Sam Boboev and you will see all of my podcasts and conversations with top leaders from fintech vertical, yeah. >> Beautiful. Well, Sam, thanks for spending some time with us. It's been an amazing episode. Big fan of your content and of your work and looking forward to this to this convergence, man. This AI and the gen tech side, the fintech side, and then mixing in the blockchain kind of underneath side. It seems like it's it's happening and it's happening quite fast.

I think by the end of the decade we'll look back and I think a lot of the financial services world will look a lot different than what we're currently seeing. So, it's it's exciting and equally equally moving very fast. >> Yeah, thanks guys for having me. >> Absolutely. We'll see you next time. Thanks Sam. >> Cheers, Sam.