The payments industry spent years turning tokenization into a business tool for lock-in. So what does it mean that the same technology might now hold the key to making agentic payments actually work?
Reggie Young sits down with Basis Theory’s Co-founder and CEO, Colin Luce, and CTO, James Armstead — the team behind the programmable token vault platform that has quietly become central to the agentic payments conversation. Colin and James break down what tokenization really is, how it was co-opted as a competitive moat, and why they believe it's the foundational layer that agentic commerce needs to get right.
They get into the reality of agentic payments today — what's hype, what's actually transacting, and why human-in-the-loop is a feature, not a bug. The conversation covers the technical choke points legacy infrastructure wasn't designed to handle, the intent and fraud problem nobody has solved yet, why the industry is over-complicating protocol selection, and what a smarter approach to tokenization could unlock.
Plus: Colin's bold prediction on the fate of PANs, James on why the early winners will just accept the volume, and the pair on why a misspelled email might be the highest compliment you can give someone in 2026.
