Wrapped
Your top ten, not mine.
Dateline: Woking, 24th December 2025.
Well, like a great many other people, I got my Spotify Unwrapped. It’s where they tell you which artists you listened to the most during the year (Hawkwind, as it happens) and which album you listened to the most during the year (”There Is No Space For Us“ by Hawkwind) and that sort of thing. It also classifies you (I’m an “Archivist”, apparently) and gives you your “listening age” (mine was a sprightly 62) and some of other fun stuff. None of which you care about, quite rightly.
The Ten Most Read Posts
Naturally, being quite a dull person, it led me to think about making an In the future, everyone will be famous for 15Mb not-a-newsletter wrapped. In other words, for 2025, what were the top 10 most read posts according to you, the readers? Well, here you go…
In tenth place, Cash and Catastrophe. The lesson that I draw from various disasters is not that we should rely more on cash but that we should put in place a means for person-to-person (or actually, device-to-device) payments that work in the absence of mobile networks, electricity and clearing systems. Some form of central bank digital currency (CBDC), for example.
In at number nine, it’s Now Appearing at Your Local Security Theatre. In the future, instead of a fraudster presenting a clerk with a bogus driving licence, the lawyer will request the information needed (e.g., your date of birth rather than your ability to ride a motor scooter) and your NWS app will ask you for permission to give it to them. There won’t be clones or forgeries because this is a world verifiable credentials and digital signatures, or secure elements and strong authentication: you can bet the house on it.
At eight with a bullet! Stablecoins are Mainstream. The banking technology commentator Tom Noyes says the idea the stablecoins will supplant established retail banking relationships is a bunch of “hooky” and goes on to make the point that banks are actually well-positioned to take advantage of innovation in this area. I agree.
Steady at seven: Retailer Stablecoins. Looking forward, [banks’ payment] services might, for example, include safety and security, data and decisioning, not only the payments themselves. In other words, banks need to start looking at services based on identification, authentication and authorisation. We’re back at identity is the new money again!
In at sixth it’s Apple and Walmart and Payments. The banks’ strategic response should be to add value around the transactions, not to try and survive off of shrinking interchange margins. In an A2A world those services are safety and security, data and decisioning, but not the payments themselves.
Now into the top five we find The Key Question in Agentic Commerce. I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that many retailers don’t know what is about to hit them. A strategy is an imperative.
Number four is The New Frontier for Payments. Banks might not be able to control the post-industrial rails or give me the post-industrial money to run on them, but they do know who I am and they do know who I pay and they do know how much my business owes them and so on. Jelena Hoffart, Director of Identity Value Chain Expansion at Mastercard, told me that she thinks it may turn out to be a pretty good business for the financial institutions to move beyond know-your-customer (KYC) to provide know-your-agent (KYA) identification and authorisation services and I think she is right.
At three is one of my favourites, Apple Pay was Useful Apple ID, Apple ID will be Indispensable. I think this vision of the future will change the world more than Apple Pay did. The lack of digital identity infrastructure is a significant drag on the evolution of online services and someone has to do something about it. If that someone else is Apple, it could be huge.
Sitting in second position we have The Cost of Fraud Should be Shared. Fintechs should not be able to evade their responsibilities for protecting consumers (caveat emptor makes no sense in the social media era) but neither should one set of marketplace participants be made to bear full responsibility for frauds that are not their fault. And if the regulators do want to take action that will have real impact on the scale and scope of fraud they should start by bringing digital identity to the mass market so that not only does the bank know that it is really dealing with you, but you know that you are really dealing with the bank.
And at number one? Well it is Open Banking? We Need Open Everything? Yes. the no.1 most read not-a-newsletter piece over the last 12 months wasn’t anything about stablecoins or AI or animal face recognition (my favourite) it was the piece about going from open banking to open everything! I believe in capitalism and competition but on a level playing field. In other words, forget about open banking and open everything. I know this sounds radical, but I hope that US regulators will, in time, choose this path, a path that grows the pie while ensuring that everyone, including banks, gets a fair slice.
Well, that’s a wrap. I have no idea what the top reads for 2026 will be, but I hope that you will stick around to find out. Next year there will be more online video discussions, more extended paid content and more thought-provoking commentary.
Here’s wishing you all the best for the holidays!