Networks & counterparties

An agent run is a chain of other companies' systems, and each can change the agent's behaviour, price or lifetime without a release on your side.

Three surprises. One model, several lifecycles: a lab's model on a cloud can follow the cloud's retirement dates (OpenAI's model on Bedrock is an exception), and Anthropic bills usage bought through AWS or Azure marketplaces as $0.01 consumption units, so a cloud commitment can pay for it. Registries vet names, not code: in a 2026 study, 9 of 11 MCP marketplaces accepted malicious submissions (a security vendor's research, summarized by the Cloud Security Alliance). Websites push back: Amazon sued Perplexity over its shopping agent (see Liability allocation).

Sources: AWS lifecycle, Anthropic pricing, CSA, GeekWire (search result).

Map every party that can change your agent without a release on your side, and how much notice each one gives.

Ask an expert: when a lab's model is bought through a cloud marketplace, whose retirement date, incident process and data terms bind the customer?

A payout is a chain of vetoes, and every link below can stop it.

Correspondents are disappearing. Active correspondent banks fell about 22% between 2011 and 2019 while payment values kept growing, from 13% fewer in North America to 34% in Latin America; the CPMI series ended with 2022 data. The Fed is leaving too: FedGlobal ACH, which credited pesos in Mexico the next banking day, takes its last forward items on November 20, 2026, citing "steep declines in transaction volumes".

Local access is gated. A foreign payout company can't join SPEI; it needs a regulated Mexican participant. Pix is for central-bank-authorized institutions, with a R$15,000 cap for the rest; in India, FX goes only through authorized dealer banks. Elsewhere it's opening: Faster Payments grew from 26 to 47 direct participants since 2018, and RPAA-registered providers may join Payments Canada since September 29, 2025. The Fed's May 2026 payment-account proposal leaves out state money transmitters, so US payout fintechs still need a bank.

Sources: CPMI, FRB Services, Mexico Business News, FinTech Global, Mayer Brown (search result).

The local partner is the product's real dependency: it holds the licence, the rail connection and your prefunded money.

Ask an expert: how many partners per corridor do you keep live for failover, and how long does it take to move volume when one goes down?

An order-to-cash flow touches a dozen organizations, and the ones that matter most never sign your contract: the payer's AP team, your sponsor bank, and whoever insures or finances the receivables.

Sources: Nacha, The Clearing House, Payments Canada, EXIM, OCC (March 2025).

This is a network business, not just SaaS: every new seller brings payers who must change behavior, and every payer already has someone else asking it to pay a different way.

ERP vendors are partners and competitors: several mid-market ERPs now embed payments through partners (vendor-reported). Watch for the one that takes the "pay" button.

Ask an expert: which ERPs embed native payments today, and what happened to third-party AR tools on those ERPs when they did?

Two kinds of network compete to own the connection to the supplier.

• Buyer-side networks: supplier portals, issuers' card enrollment programs, AP payment networks. Each portal is a walled garden; in the Fed's words, accounting systems are "closed-loop and not interoperable", so suppliers juggle many buyer portals (FedPayments Improvement).
• Open exchange networks: DBNAlliance (a US e-invoice network set up in 2023 by Business Payments Coalition pilot participants), Peppol, and EDI value-added networks. DBNAlliance uses Peppol's four-corner model: a business joins through a service provider, not directly. Neither the US nor Canada has a national Peppol authority; OpenPeppol fills that role.

Virtual card acceptance is the network that surprises people. One public corporate-payments company's annual filing says each issuer negotiates acceptance with the supplier directly, so another issuer's virtual cards aren't interchangeable. Visa's Supplier Matching Service compares a buyer's vendor file with Visa's commercial merchant data each month to flag suppliers that have taken commercial cards, and issuers use it to size a buyer's program (Visa Developer).

Virtual card acceptance is a network you enroll suppliers into, one issuer at a time, not a rail you switch on.

Ask an expert: does enrolling a supplier with one issuer make the next issuer's enrollment easier or harder? Will buyer portals become DBNAlliance access points, or fight them?

A card program is a chain of contracts: network to bank, bank to program manager, processor to bank, bank to company, and bank to employee only under individual liability.

Three surprises. Single points of failure: on October 20, 2025, a change on Visa's side stopped North American traffic reaching one issuer processor, and stand-in rates stayed high until a fix by October 30. Migrations happen: one public expense company moved its card to a new sponsor bank in 2024, keeping its processor and network. The interchange contract may not be yours: one public processor's bank contracts give it all the interchange, which it shares with customers.

Sources: Visa 10-K (FY2025); processor, bank and platform figures from their filings and the processor's status page (company-reported; basis points are my arithmetic).

A spend fintech owns the customer but rents the license, the rails and sometimes the interchange contract, and each landlord can change the terms without asking.

Ask an expert: if our sponsor bank froze new accounts tomorrow, how long would a BIN migration take and what would break?

A US business text passes through at least four companies before it reaches a phone, and any of them can stop it.

The chain: brand → platform (registered at TCR as the CSP, campaign service provider) → DCA or aggregator → carrier → handset. Alongside sit TCR, the vetting firms Aegis and WMC (whose scores set throughput), and Campaign Verify for political senders (providers report it's required on toll-free and short codes too since February 17, 2026).

Sources: TCR, Somos, FreeCallerRegistry, Google, Apple.

Abroad, the MNO is the gatekeeper and sets the termination price (what it charges to deliver to its subscriber). Colombia requires a registered integrator for short codes (CRC), Nigeria routes international A2P through a single licensed gateway (Babalakin & Co), and Brazil plans a central directory binding short code brokers by contract (announced January 2026, not yet confirmed live).

Then there are counterparties nobody signs with: grey routes (traffic pushed through consumer SIMs in "SIM boxes" to dodge termination fees) and SMS pumpers. Most of the rules in this guide exist because of them.

Ask an expert: how many resale levels sit between NANPA and your numbers, and what happens to that chain if the FCC limits resale to one level, as its 2026 numbering proposal would?