Money2020 this year was unforgettable for
@KnotAPIs, and I believe we'll look back on it as the inflection point for merchant connectivity.
Two months ago, "merchant connectivity" was a niche concept: connecting users to their merchant accounts, keeping those connections alive, and, with their permission, taking action on their behalf.
Now everyone needs a merchant connectivity strategy, and Knot's need is growing rapidly. The stakes are bigger, and the penalty for not owning the merchant connection is massive.
Here's why it suddenly matters:
Banks risk becoming a commodity if they don't own the relationship between their customers and merchants. Personal agentic apps (Muse, Instinct, and the dozen more coming) want that seat. Outsource it, and disintermediation is a matter of time. First they get the eyeballs. Then they get the money. Suddenly, you're trying to hold onto a customer who's getting more personalized service elsewhere and can switch at any time.
Networks risk losing for the same reason. If someone else holds the connection between the user and the merchant accounts, you've handed Stripe and everyone like them a new front to compete on. It now becomes frictionless to switch from card -> pay by bank, stablecoins, etc.
Whoever owns the connections owns the future.
Some people on the floor think the frontier is browser automation: an agent clicking through a website like a person would. It isn't. The real frontier is turning browser automation into deterministic APIs. Same call, same result, every time, securely, at scale. It’s the less glamorous work behind more than 1 million actions Knot powers every day.
Which brings me to Supernova, which is the tool we built internally to ship every merchant integration we have. In the past week, we've had requests from some of the largest companies in the world and some of the smallest, across industries well outside fintech. Use cases I would not have guessed. I couldn’t be more excited to pull more people off the waitlist and see what they build, which, right now, is a lot of agentic shopping on industry-specific sites.
Shoutout to our friends for always making this week so special. See you next year. A lot to show you before then!