o: cap+scope+expiry+revoke

p: requires-properties

era: agentic

s: agent-allowance

o: custody-and-float-risk

p: concentrates

basis: ppi-india

s: agent-wallet-balance

o: parental-and-corporate-card-controls

p: proven-by

s: allowance-model

agentic-payment: lexicon/agentic-payment

allowance: lexicon/allowance

mandate: lexicon/mandate

gist: Delegated agent spend should be structured as allowances (cap, scope, expiry, one-gesture revoke) rather than wallets (custodial balances), because allowances are the only delegated-money model ordinary users can reason about and they avoid custody/float regulatory exposure.

provenance: first-hand

type: supports

type: derives-from

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Allowances, not wallets" (cut-0101), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0101


gist: Before UPI, sending money to a friend in India meant wallets — Paytm, MobiKwik, FreeCharge — prepaid balances behind separate KYC walls. At Mypoolin we were building Asia's first social payments app, Venmo-shaped, and the only P2P infrastructure available was whatever APIs we could talk the incumbent wallets into exposing. We spent two years scaling on top of that, friction included: users had to load money into a wallet before they could send any of it.

type: related

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Early to UPI, still shaped like a wallet" (cut-0102), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0102


settlement: lexicon/settlement

two-clocks: lexicon/two-clocks

gist: Every payment system runs two clocks. The **experience clock** is the one the payer watches: tap, spinner, tick. The **money clock** is the one the banks obey: clearing files, netting windows, settlement finality. No mainstream system keeps the two synchronized, because synchronizing them is expensive and hiding the gap is cheap.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Every payment system is two clocks" (cut-0200), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0200


narrow-waist-architecture: lexicon/narrow-waist-architecture

vpa: lexicon/vpa

gist: UPI's quietest brilliant decision was the address. A Virtual Payment Address — `name@bank` — does for money what DNS did for the web: it separates the name people use from the account plumbing underneath.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "The VPA is DNS for money" (cut-0201), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0201


credit-push: lexicon/credit-push

gist: In a **credit-push** system, the payer's side initiates: money leaves my bank because I told my bank to send it. In a debit-pull system, the payee's side initiates: money leaves my account because someone presented my credentials and asked for it. Cards are pull. UPI's default flow is push — even the "collect request" is just a message asking me to push.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "UPI is credit-push by design" (cut-0203), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0203


gist: When a card is approved at checkout, no money moves. **Authorization is a promise** — the issuer says "I will probably honor this" and places a hold. **Clearing is an invoice** — the actual claim arrives later in a batch file. **Settlement is the money** — funds move between banks days after the customer left the store. And for months afterward, the whole thing can be unwound by a dispute.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Every swipe is a loan" (cut-0211), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0211


chargeback: lexicon/chargeback

interchange: lexicon/interchange

mdr: lexicon/mdr

gist: The standard complaint about cards is that moving a few kilobytes of transaction data cannot possibly cost 2%. Correct — and beside the point. Interchange was never the price of moving data. It is the price of a governed marketplace.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Interchange is a governance fee, not a payment fee" (cut-0212), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0212


kirana-test: lexicon/kirana-test

gist: A kirana is a one-family corner store — the unit of Indian retail. UPI won India the afternoon a kirana owner could accept digital payments with nothing but a printed QR code taped to the counter. No terminal, no integration, no sales rep, no monthly fee. Adoption cost: one laminated sheet.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "The kirana test" (cut-0215), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0215


gist: Post-UPI, Mypoolin finally had what we'd wanted all along: peer-to-peer and group payments with real traction, on a rail that was free, universal, instant. Then the giants noticed the category. WhatsApp launched payments inside the app India already lived in. Google Pay launched with cashbacks — real money, spent at a scale that redrew DAU charts. We were a startup. We could not buy users back.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "The ledger was not a moat" (cut-0216), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0216


gist: In 2021, mapping the embedded-lending value chain, I described the embedding platform's role in three words: **agent of the borrower**. A vertical-SaaS platform that surfaces credit inside its own workflows sits on the borrower's side of the table — it sees their cash flows, anticipates their needs, and its incentives ride on their survival, not on loan volume. The alignment, not the distribution, was the whole point.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Agent of the borrower" (cut-0300), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0300


gist: Four years of embedded credit distilled to one surviving rule: the lending earns the right to embed, but **the battle is won in the app's user interface — the pixels.** A credit product can be priced right and underwritten right and still die because it arrived as a banner instead of a moment: surfaced outside the workflow where the need actually lives. Banners don't work. Context does.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "The battle is won in the pixels" (cut-0301), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0301


gist: Traditional lending is reactive: a business feels the squeeze, applies, and a stranger reconstructs its life from bureau files and bank statements. Embedded lending inverted the sequence. The platform already holds the operating truth — orders, invoices, refunds, seasonality — so for the first time a lender could anticipate a business's needs *before they arise* and surface credit at the moment of need instead of the moment of application.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "The transaction log is the credit file" (cut-0302), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/cut-0302


o: new-row-not-new-column

p: is

era: universal

s: value-chain-entrant

o: data

p: adds-value-along

s: borrower

o: distribution+data

secondary: capital+technology

s: embedding-platform

o: technology

s: fintech-infra-provider

secondary: technology

s: data-aggregator

s: derived-data-provider

secondary: data

s: payments-services-provider

s: credit-bureau

s: underwriting-modeller

o: capital

s: lender

s: borrower-agent

o: embedding-platform

p: competes-with

columns: distribution+data

gist: Every participant in the lending value chain adds value along one or more of four dimensions — capital, distribution, data, technology. New entrants are new rows in that grid, never new columns: an actor that cannot name its column is not in the chain. The borrower's agent enters as a distribution+data row, which puts it in direct competition with the embedding platform for the same two columns.

suggested_citation: agenticpayments.dev, "Four things anyone can bring to a loan" (cut-0303), July 2026, https://agenticpayments.dev/cuts/four-things-anyone-can-bring-to-a-loan