Weekly Stock Tally Shows Big Tech Up and Banks Down

Payment names led to the downside this past week, shortened by the Labor Day holiday, as the CE 100 Index gave up 0.2%. Six of the 11 pillars were lower, led by the Pay and Be Paid segment, offset a bit by Alphabet’s jump in the wake of news that Google has skirted a breakup on antitrust grounds.

The Pay and be Paid pillar slipped 2.5%, led by Sezzle, which gave up about 9.3%, followed by Block, which lost 5.9%.

Visa shares declined by 2.4%. As reported this week by PYMNTS, the payments network said it will open access to its production Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so developers can plug artificial intelligence (AI) agents directly into Visa Intelligent Commerce application programming interfaces (APIs).

The company is also piloting an Acceptance Agent Toolkit that lets nontechnical teams generate invoices, create payment links and run analytics using plain prompts.

In an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Visa Senior Vice President and Global Head of Growth Rubail Birwadker said the MCP server acts as a secure integration layer that standardizes how agents and large language models interact with Visa’s services.

“The goal is to extend the trust of the Visa brand into the future of agentic commerce,” Birwadker said. “An MCP layer removes friction for developers and drives standardization at scale.”

Banking names dipped by 1.2%. JPMorgan shares were 2.3% lower.

JPMorgan is reportedly is set to bring its digital retail bank Chase to Germany next year.

Chase’s first product in that country will be a savings account, “because of the popularity of savings products in Germany,” Daniel Llano Manibardo, J.P. Morgan’s head of German retail banking, told the Financial Times. He added that its operations in the country would be “gradually expanded.”

Alphabet Skirts the Worst

Alphabet shares gained ground on positive news related to antitrust rulings, though the Enablers segment was 0.5% lower as names like Workday retraced gains, sliding more than 5%.

Alphabet shares rallied 10% in the wake of news that the penalty imposed on the company by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, one year after finding that Google operates an illegal monopoly in online advertising, was far more modest than the Justice Department had sought.

It does not require Google’s parent Alphabet to divest any assets, or share its vast data hoard with competitors, and it allows Google to continue to pay Apple and others for placement of its search engine and Chrome browser on their devices. Instead, it bars Google from paying for exclusivity on devices and requires it to share only a limited amount of search data.

Separately, Apple shares were 3.3% higher after news this week that it is reportedly developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered web search tool that could be added to its Siri voice assistant, its Safari web browser and its Spotlight search features on the iPhone.

The search tool, dubbed World Knowledge Answers, would look up information from the internet and summarize the results, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and apps from companies like Perplexity AI, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

Porch Group shares posted the second highest gains in the CE 100 Index, adding 7.7%  and helping the Live Group gain 1.2%.

The company said this past week its Home Factors property intelligence platform has completed testing with multiple new insurance carriers. The tests reportedly  generated ROI greater than 20x across each carrier. Over the next several months, the company expects to approach 100 property attributes available.

According to the release, Home Factors provided insights to over 88% of the carriers’ policy data. Analysis identified segments with 23%-50% higher loss ratios, tied to attributes such as signs of water intrusion, electrical panel size, and signs of electrical repairs needed.