The Painted Stork

[#85] The future of fintech in India: RBI has a vision for payments per its 2028 vision document. Just not for the companies building it

RBI's 2028 vision focuses on fraud liability, MSME financing, and xborder friction. But limited monetization in payments, and the RBI strategy to…

Apr 5 • Ambika Pande

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[#84] Stripe's MPP, Coinbase's x402, the A2A Payment Protocols, and why stablecoins will power the agentic economy

Everyone's talking agentic payments. But there are two markets here: agentic commerce and machine payments. MPP and x402 are building for the latter…

Apr 2 • Ambika Pande and Viraj Arya

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March 2026

[#83] The AI Money Movement Layer (Part 2): 5 Blueprints Built on the Same Core Principles

Stripe SPT, Visa Agent Pay, Google AP2: the rails for AI payments are being built. But who verifies the agent? Who catches hallucinated purchases? And…

Mar 3 • Ambika Pande

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February 2026

[#82] From Zero to Live (Part 3): Claude Code, the Organization's AI stack, and who are we actually building AI for?

Claude / Codex is powerful but the onus needs to be put on the organization to become truly unlock AI. We are at a crossroads with AI usage, and as a…

Feb 23 • Ambika Pande

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[#81] Credit Lines on UPI (CLOU) will eat small ticket lending, but requires key ecosystem unlocks to reach that inflection point

All signs point to CLOU solving for existing problems in small ticket lending, but it'll require market awareness, a robust monetization construct, and…

Feb 14 • Ambika Pande

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[#80] Google's UCP & AP2: Moving agentic commerce from just "plausible" to "scalable"

With MCP, ACP, Google's AP2, and now UCP, the focus needs to be in laying foundations org and ecosystem wide for ease of of agentic execution across…

Feb 7 • Ambika Pande

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January 2026

[#79] Do all roads in fintech lead the license aggregation ( Part 7): The evolving payments play

Where players sit in PA-O, PA-P, PA-CB (inward and outward remittance), either standalone, or a combination of several licenses says a lot about fintech…

Jan 30 • Ambika Pande

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[#78] Banking in India: FDI investment, bank consolidation, and the "great re-bundling"

PSU and RRB consolidation, Japanese investment in Indian BFSI, all banks becoming universal banks, and fintechs becoming SFBs with a path to full banks…

Jan 5 • Ambika Pande

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November 2025

[#77] The future of fintech in India: How do we approach monetization in the age of DPI?

With DPI in India heating up (UPI, and offerings such as AA, ONDC, ULI etc), core offerings being positioned as a "free good," what is the monetizable…

Nov 24, 2025 • Ambika Pande

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[#76] From zero to live (Part 2): Testing Emergent’s “AI-built backend” promise (and hitting the limits)

Vibe coding using front end tools is just another word for fancy prototyping - setting up backend services is still very much a challenge, and we may be…

Nov 2, 2025 • Ambika Pande and Chinmay Shah

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October 2025

[#75] The AI Money Movement Layer: MCP, ACP & TAP are launched but are autonomous payments really the future?

Protocols launched by OpenAI, Stripe, Visa and Google (AP2) suggest that autonomous payments are the future, but some protocols are mandates hiding…

Oct 18, 2025 • Ambika Pande

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September 2025

[#74] Do all roads in fintech lead to license aggregation? (Part 6): Multi-license fintechs are driving profits and IPOs

India’s single PA license limits smaller players, while UK & Singapore use tiered licensing. Standalone players have razor thin margins, it's the…

Sep 22, 2025 • Ambika Pande

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