Dutch payments company Mollie is looking for a founding team to create a new venture building banking and financial infrastructure for AI agents. It is offering up to €50 million in equity, released in stages against milestones. The team would control the architecture, hiring and strategy, with access to Mollie's infrastructure and customers. The company is also open to folding in existing startups working on something similar.

What it means: Mollie's move is unusual in form but logical in strategy. Large payment players believe that part of shopping and paying will soon be done by AI agents acting for people and businesses. Doing that safely needs accounts, spending limits, permissions and controls that do not yet exist in a standard form. Instead of building it inside the existing organisation, Mollie is handing ownership and autonomy to a new team, much like a venture studio. For the Greek ecosystem there are two points of interest. First, the offer is aimed at teams in Europe, so Greek founders with payments and AI experience can apply. Second, it shows that payment providers see AI agents as a new kind of customer, so Greek fintechs and banks should think about how they will verify who gave the instruction when software makes a payment. PSD2's strong customer authentication rules were not designed for these cases, and PSD3 may need clarification. Whoever builds the right control and liability tools early will have an advantage. Merchants should also start asking their payment providers how agent-initiated orders will be identified, authorised and disputed, since chargeback rules will matter as much as the technology.

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