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Issue 112 | November 2025
The ofcial magazine of
© Merchant Payments Ecosystem
AI is no longer the future What are the main challenges for the payments
market? Behind the scenes of MPE 2026 AI × merchant payments: Insights
driving tomorrow Neira Jones: Your guide through payments jargon
MPE 2025 awards winners interviews industry reports
magazine
2MPE Magazine |
Contents
Contents
Editorial
Expert insights
MPE 2026 updates
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Guide through payments jargon
MPE 2025 Awards winners
MPE 2026 in news
MPE Webinars
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3
5
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13
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Contents
3MPE Magazine |
Editorial
MPE 2025 Awards winners
We celebrate Celeris and Brite Payments,
recognised for turning AI and open banking into
measurable merchant gains — from 80% year-
to-date growth in analytics-driven orchestration
(Celeris) to 20% of payments processed via instant
open banking (Brite).
BNPL Reality Check
In her new white paper, Andréa Toucinho unpacks
Europe’s regulatory shift toward responsible
lending under the upcoming Second Consumer
Credit Directive, where solvency checks and
consumer protections will become mandatory for
BNPL providers.
Behind the scenes of MPE 2026
Our feature interview dives into how this year’s
campaign theme — “Mirroring Change” — brings
together transformation, collaboration, and
professional development through MPE NXT, a
new pillar combining mentoring, masterclasses,
and upskilling for the AI era.
Glossary spotlight
Neira Jones tackles one of payments’ hidden
inefciencies: outdated terminology. Her refreshed
Payments Glossaries 2025 reference lists more
than 1,000 veried denitions across 19 sources
— from central banks to industry players — nally
updating the sector’s vocabulary for the digital
age.
The numbers tell us
The data points in this Issue speak louder than
predictions:
•
AI-driven fraud detection already cuts false
positives by up to 95%, according to Neira
Jones.
If the last issue of MPE Magazine explored the
promise of AI in payments, this one documents
its reality. Across this edition, experts agree: AI
is no longer experimental — it’s operational.
From dynamic fraud detection and risk scoring
to predictive routing and agentic commerce,
automation now powers every layer of the
merchant payments stack.
As Sam Boboev writes in his opening feature:
“AI isn’t the future — it’s running your payments
today.”
That’s not hype. It’s what’s already happening
across acquirers, PSPs, and ntechs worldwide.
Inside the issue
This issue takes you straight into the AI-driven
transformation of payments — with fresh data,
predictions, and rst-hand perspectives:
AI × merchant payments
Our ambassadors and advisors — from Angela
Yore and Charlotte Al Usta to Geoff Barraclough
and Volker Schloenvoigt — share what’s real and
what’s next.
According to BCG, AI agents could influence
over 50% of online spend by 2030, reshaping
checkout as we know it. Others forecast the
agentic commerce market to grow from $130
billion in 2025 to $1.7 trillion by 2030. These shifts
will redene how merchants, PSPs, and consumers
interact.
Hiring with purpose
Exclusive interview with Harrison Williams
(PaymentGenes) on 2025’s talent reset: compliance
as a growth enabler, AI moving from buzzword
to business line, and hybrid models that actually
retain top performers.
4MPE Magazine |
Editorial
So read, debate, and experiment now.
The next chapter of merchant payments isn’t being
written someday — it’s being written today, in real
data and real deployments.
Happy reading,
Natalia Ivanis
CMO, MPE Conference
•
Klarna is setting the standard for practical AI
deployment—and the payoff is compounding
fast. Since 2022, Klarna has streamlined its
workforce by ~40% while raising the share of
tech employees from 36% in 2022 to 52% in Q1
2025. 96% of employees use AI daily—helping
drive a 152% increase in revenue per employee
since Q1’23 and putting Klarna on track to reach
$1 million in revenue per employee.
•
Across Europe, more than 3,800 banks are now
connected to open-banking rails like Brite IPN,
making instant payments the new standard,
not an exception.
These developments mark a clear inection point
— AI isn’t just improving payments; it’s redening
performance metrics for an entire industry.
Prepare for what’s next
The takeaway from Issue 112 is simple: The
competitive advantage in payments is shifting
from access to intelligence.
By MPE 2026, AI-powered orchestration and
agentic transactions won’t be side topics — they’ll
be the main stage.
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Share it!
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MPE conference & community
Newsletter
5MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
means frictionless choice; for merchants, higher
conversions and stickier relationships.
Looking toward 2025–2026, a few trends stand out:
•
Agentic commerce: AI assistants that don’t just
recommend but buy on behalf of consumers.
This will push merchants to think about
machine-to-machine interactions.
•
Fraud orchestration 2.0: Instead of just
blocking bad transactions, AI will continuously
adapt across networks, learning from signals
in real time.
•
Identity and wallets blending: Expect to see
digital wallets double as identity layers, with
AI streamlining KYC, AML, and onboarding in
the background.
Personalisation is another frontier—AI can tailor
offers, loyalty rewards, and even payment options
dynamically. Imagine walking into a store and your
wallet proactively suggests “pay with card X for 5%
cashback,” or a merchant pushing a time-sensitive
discount that matches your purchase history.
Challenges & adoption
For merchants, the main barrier isn’t the
technology—it’s the foundations. Dirty or
siloed data makes it hard to apply AI effectively.
Integration is another hurdle; many merchants
operate on legacy platforms that weren’t designed
for real-time AI decisions. And there’s the question
of trust: merchants want explainable AI, not a black
Fintech Wrap Up’s Sam Boboev takes us inside the
evolving world of AI in payments, showing how
intelligent systems optimise transactions, prevent
fraud, and personalise customer experiences in real
time. From agentic commerce to smarter wallets,
Sam’s insights reveal why the winners of tomorrow
are those experimenting with AI today.
AI in payments & expense management
AI has already shifted from hype to necessity.
Strategically, we see it woven into the full payment
lifecycle: from smart transaction routing and
dynamic risk scoring to automating back-ofce
workows in accounts payable (AP) and receivable
(AR). Take routing: AI can now analyse hundreds
of variables (issuer behaviour, time of day, fraud
risk) to choose the optimal path for a payment in
milliseconds. On the expense side, platforms like
Ramp and Brex use AI to auto-categorise spend,
detect policy violations, and even initiate approvals,
turning what used to be reactive processes into
proactive controls. The impact is measurable:
higher approval rates, lower fraud losses, and fewer
manual hours wasted on reconciliation.
Emerging trends & wallets
AI-powered wallets are no longer just “digital
cardholders”—they’re evolving into financial
companions. A wallet can recommend the best
payment method based on FX rates, loyalty
points, or cashback, and in the future, it may even
negotiate fees or automatically split payments
across funding sources. For consumers, that
AI is no longer the future
— it’s running your
payments today
Sam Boboev / Founder & CEO / Fintech Wrap Up
6MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
advantage. Waiting for a “perfect” solution is the
riskiest strategy.
Vision for the future
In the long run, I see AI becoming a dual-layer force
in ntech:
•
Invisible infrastructure: Fraud detection,
reconciliation, settlement routing, FX
optimisation—all happening quietly in the
background.
•
Visible differentiation: Hyper-personalised
wallets, conversational interfaces, and AI
agents making proactive payment decisions
for customers.
The winners will be those who master both layers—
using AI to quietly fix inefficiencies under the
hood and to create visible, delightful customer
experiences. AI won’t just support payments; it
will dene how money moves, how merchants
build loyalty, and how consumers interact with
commerce.
box.
For small and mid-sized merchants, the way
forward is incremental. Don’t try to “build AI”—
leverage what’s already embedded in your PSP,
acquirer, or expense tool. Something as simple
as AI-powered invoice capture or fraud scoring
can unlock immediate ROI. From there, scale to
smarter routing, dynamic pricing, or personalised
customer engagement. The key is to adopt
modularly, not as a massive upfront investment.
MPE 2026 & the future
By the time MPE 2026 arrives, I believe we’ll see AI-
driven orchestration take centre stage. Payments
will increasingly be managed by AI “agents” that
optimise for cost, approval rate, and settlement
time simultaneously. On the nance side, think of
AI CFO assistants handling liquidity management,
forecasting cash ow, or agging anomalies before
they snowball.
My single piece of advice? Start experimenting
now. The organisations that build AI literacy early—
by testing and iterating—will compound their
Buy Now Pay Later
(BNPL): What are the
main challenges for the
payments market?
Andréa Toucinho / Director of studies, prospective
and training / Partelya Consulting
7MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
Example: EPI Company aims at integrating an
instant financing option in the wallet Wero.
Nevertheless, many retailers and payments
leaders pay attention to the fact that BNPL must
not be applied in all the transactions because of
the risks of lack of control for the end-user already
mentioned. The link between BNPL and innovation
in payments is clear also because many payments
technologies can be used in the evolution of BNPL.
Examples : open banking is seen as a practical way
to facilitate the verication of solvability and digital
identity as a key aspect for the KYC processes.
These insights testify to the fact that even if BNPL
and payments are worked separately in the eld
of regulation, the links between the two markets
are clear in a more and more competitive market.
If you want to receive the white paper, contact
andrea.toucinho@partelya.com
Published in September of 2025, the new white
paper realized by Andréa Toucinho, Director of
Studies, Prospective and Training of Partelya
Consulting, is based on the main issues of Buy
Now Pay Later (BNPL). Among the questions:
the definition, the uses of BNPL in Europe,
the concerns of the payments companies,
the regulatory framework, and the different
interactions between BNPL and the payments
innovations.
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is a huge success in
Europe. In fact, linked with the development of
e-commerce – above all since the Covid crisis
– and the economic context, this innovation is
very appreciated by the European consumers.
Nevertheless, many payments and BNPL
companies are aware of the different questions
linked with this kind of uses and above all the
question of the protection of consumers.
One of the convergent opinion is: even if BNPL
is not a direct cause of over indebtedness, it can
be a factor of lack of control of the spendings.
Hence some key recommendations shared
by the payments and BNPL companies: more
responsibility of the players of the market, some
key rules and, why not, a conduct code to share
some “best practices” in this eld. This vision is very
convergent with the evolution of regulation since
the second consumer credit directive integrates
BNPL to foster a more secure and responsible
activity.
Among the key aspects of this new step: the
necessity to verify the solvability of clients and
more protections for the consumer. This vision is
convergent with the evolution of the payments
legislation because, since the rst PSD, the idea
of EU regulators is to foster a payments market
based on a balance between innovation and
security/protection of consumers. That’s why the
links between BNPL and payments market are
important. In addition to this reality, it is clear
that BNPL solutions are more and more seen as a
differentiating element in the payments solutions.
8MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
Candidate expectations are high. They value
transparent communication, exibility, and trust
throughout the hiring process, and they’re quick
to walk away from organisations that don’t offer it.
“Return-to-office policies are causing friction;
rms pushing for three or more ofce days are
losing top performers. The market clearly favours
hybrid setups that combine accountability with
autonomy.”
Employers are responding by rethinking how
they measure performance and collaboration. The
best results come from hybrid environments that
empower people to deliver outcomes, not clock
hours.
Compliance and AI are now mission-critical
Two functions have emerged as essential pillars for
2025 and beyond: compliance and AI. What used
to be considered “future priorities” are now central
to operations, growth, and scalability.
“Compliance is now the backbone of growth.”
“AI has moved from buzzword to business line.”
“Businesses are hiring AI and ML engineers, data
scientists, and AI product managers to drive
automation, fraud prevention, and customer
experience. The question isn’t ‘should we use AI’
but ‘how quickly can we implement it?’”
This dual focus reflects the evolution of the
payments industry. On one side, compliance
Hiring is back, but with purpose
Even with a cautious economic outlook, Fintech
hiring is picking up again, especially in compliance,
AI, and engineering. Companies are hiring more
intentionally, focusing on meeting regulatory
demands, automating operations, and building
long-term competitive strength.
“Hiring is back, but with purpose.”
The tone of hiring has changed signicantly since
2024. Many companies spent that year in slow or
reactive mode, focusing only on critical hires. But
2025 marks a new phase, one where companies
are building for resilience and compliance, not just
for headcount growth.
In practice, this means prioritising talent that
creates value beyond cost. Compliance, AI, and risk
roles have become core enablers of scalability and
investor trust. The new wave of hiring is designed
to make businesses leaner, faster, and more
compliant, not just bigger.
Candidate condence is stronger than ever
The shift in employer intent is mirrored by a shift in
candidate condence. The Fintech talent market is
active again, and professionals are ready to move
for the right opportunity.
“Professionals feel secure but open to change.
Over 80% are considering new opportunities, and
many are ready to move within six months for the
right role.”
Hiring with purpose:
Inside ntech’s talent
shift for 2025
Harrison Williams / Team Lead, Recruitment /
PaymentGenes
9MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
“Upskilling makes sense when teams already have
a solid operational base, people who know your
systems, customers, and risk appetite, but need
deeper technical or regulatory skills.”
Upskilling can be cost-effective and strengthens
employee loyalty. It also develops internal expertise
in key areas, such as AI literacy, compliance, and
data analytics.
But when speed is critical, such as entering a new
region, navigating new regulations, or scaling
infrastructure, external hiring delivers faster results.
“External hiring is faster when entering new
markets, facing regulatory changes, or needing
hard-to-train expertise.”
The most successful organisations are doing
both: building strong internal capability while
supplementing it with experienced specialists who
can deliver immediately.
Payments orchestration and the New Team
Model
As merchants adopt multi-provider, multi-region
payment stacks, orchestration is becoming a
strategic capability. It requires cross-functional
collaboration among product, engineering, data,
and compliance teams.
“It’s no longer enough to have a ‘payments
manager.”
This evolution means companies are building
distributed teams that bring together expertise
from across Europe. Many now operate with data
engineers in Spain, compliance leads in Germany,
product teams in Amsterdam, and operations in
London, maximising time zone coverage and local
knowledge.
“Orchestration moves fast, and hiring has to keep
pace. Top engineers and compliance leaders
won’t wait around. We advise companies to
shorten cycles, communicate clearly, and offer
remote options to avoid losing critical talent to
professionals enable faster licensing and market
entry, reducing friction and building trust with
regulators. On the other, AI talent brings the
intelligence layer, automating fraud detection,
optimising pricing, and personalising experiences
across markets.
Together, they dene how modern Fintechs grow
safely and efciently.
Where demand is returning rst
PaymentGenes data shows that hiring is
rebounding in key verticals:
•
Compliance & Risk: Regulatory reform in
payments, crypto, and banking is driving
demand, particularly in Germany and the
Netherlands. These roles have evolved from
control functions into accelerators of business
expansion.
•
AI, Data & Engineering: AI/ML engineers,
data scientists, and backend developers are
highly sought across the Netherlands, UK, and
Germany. They power automation, embedded
nance, and orchestration.
• Payments Infrastructure & Product: Ongoing
mergers, integrations, and orchestration
projects continue to require specialised
technical and operational talent.
•
Finance Leadership: Strategic finance
professionals are helping mature Fintechs
improve capital efficiency and investor
communication.
This shift toward foundational and high-impact
roles shows a maturing ecosystem: one that values
sustainable scale over short-term growth.
Build vs. Buy: How companies are lling the gap
As the pace of innovation quickens, companies
face a choice: develop existing teams or bring in
external expertise. The right answer often depends
on business stage and market ambition.
10MPE Magazine |
Expert insights
Leaders who build trust, communicate clearly,
and create growth paths are experiencing lower
attrition rates and higher employee engagement.
The emphasis is on fostering a culture of ownership,
where employees see their contribution to
business success.
Flexible work, career progression, and professional
development have become the strongest
differentiators for retaining both senior and mid-
level talent.
Closing thought
The Fintech industry’s hiring reset for 2025 is less
about expansion and more about intentional
growth. Companies are hiring for resilience,
compliance, and scalability, while professionals
are choosing roles that align with their values and
ambitions.
“Hiring is back, but with purpose.”
That sense of purpose, building stable, innovative,
and human-centered teams, is dening a new era
for Fintech and payments alike. In the years ahead,
the organisations that grow thoughtfully, invest in
their people, and connect technology with trust
will be the ones that lead the industry forward.
Discover the full report: Access the Salary & Hiring
Trends in Payments H1 2025 Recap & Outlook,
created in partnership with MPE, and explore the
data, trends, and strategies shaping Fintech hiring
today.
competitors.”
The result: lean, agile, cross-border teams designed
for scalability.
The skills that will dene 2026
Fintech success in 2026 will belong to professionals
who can bridge technology, data, and business
strategy. PaymentGenes highlights a set of
non-negotiable skills that will define the next
generation of payments talent.
“The embedded nance landscape is evolving
rapidly. The most successful professionals will
blend technical skill with strategic insight.”
Core competencies include embedded nance
knowledge, data-driven decision-making, AI
and machine-learning literacy, API-rst product
uency, and cross-functional collaboration.
“Success will go to people who can bridge data,
technology, and business strategy.”
Technical capability remains vital, but what’s
most valuable is the ability to connect insights to
outcomes, to translate technology into business
impact.
Leadership and retention: The human factor
Hiring and retention are no longer just about
salaries or perks; they’re about purpose and
empowerment.
“Top talent stays when they feel challenged,
valued, and empowered.”
berlin
march 17-19, 2026
11MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 updates
merchants and payment companies. MPE 2026 is
responding with formats and experiences that are
more dynamic, collaborative, and practical. From
redesigned conference structures to hands-on
roundtables, workshops, and curated networking,
we ensure that every participant — whether a local
player or a global brand — leaves with insights and
tools they can apply immediately.
3. Which emerging trends or breakthrough
technologies are set to disrupt merchant
payments, and how is MPE 2026 putting them
center stage?
AI, agentic commerce, embedded finance,
stablecoins, digital wallets, payment orchestration,
fraud prevention, tokenization, cyber resilience, and
more trends and innovations, and technologies
are all reshaping how merchants and consumers
interact. At MPE 2026, these aren’t just buzzwords
— they’re at the heart of the program. Through
our Innovation Hub, expert-led insights, and
live showcases, participants will see how these
technologies are already being applied today, and
where they’re headed next.
4. Every transformation comes with challenges—
how will MPE 2026 help participants turn
obstacles into opportunities and bold moves?
Change can feel daunting, but it’s also where
the biggest opportunities emerge. MPE 2026
is designed to help participants face disruption
with condence. We’re creating an open space to
tackle tough issues — from compliance and fraud
Ready to discover the bold moves, big ideas, and
transformative insights shaping MPE 2026? Don’t
miss our interview with CMO Natália Ivanis, where
she shares her vision for the newly launched
campaign—how it’s redefining the payments
world, reecting the evolving needs of merchants
and innovators, and highlighting the trends and
technology driving the future.
1. MPE 2026 has ofcially launched—how do you
see this campaign shaking up the payments
world and creating ripple effects across the
industry?
MPE has always been more than just an event —
it’s a catalyst for change. With MPE 2026, we’re
pushing the boundaries even further. By centring
the campaign on transformation and how the
industry mirrors the needs of its stakeholders,
we’re not just sparking conversations but creating
ripple effects that bring merchants, innovators, and
regulators closer together. Payments is evolving at
lightning speed, and our role is to give the industry
a platform where bold ideas don’t just get debated
— they’re translated into collective action.
2. Transformation and Mirroring change is
the key theme of the year. How is MPE 2026
reecting the evolving needs of merchants,
consumers, and payment innovators?
“Mirroring change” means recognizing that what
happens at the macro level — new regulations,
emerging technologies, shifting consumer
expectations — is reected in the daily realities of
Behind the scenes of
MPE 2026
Natalia Ivanis / CMO and Managing Partner /
Merchant Payments Ecosystem
12MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 updates
For me, MPE 2026 is about legacy through
community. My role is evolving from marketer to
connector — curating voices, amplifying diverse
perspectives, and weaving them into one unied
ecosystem. I want this edition to be remembered
as the one where we didn’t just talk about
transformation, but truly embodied it — through
our formats, inclusivity, and the way we bridged
innovation with regulation.
If participants leave Berlin feeling both inspired
and empowered to lead change in their own
organisations, then we’ve done our job.
to scaling innovation across borders — and to share
strategies that turn friction into growth. A big part
of this is our new MPE NXT pillar: A professional-
development program with mentoring,
masterclasses, skills panels, roundtables, and
workshops that prepare individuals to thrive in the
age of AI. We want people to leave Berlin not just
inspired but equipped for bold moves.
5. On a personal note, as MPE itself evolves, how
do you see your role transforming, and what
legacy do you hope this edition will leave on the
payments industry?
Join the MPE
community
@LinkedIn /X / Facebook / Instagram
follow #ilovempe #mpecosystem #mpe
#mpe2026 #mpeberlin
Newsletter
13MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
Merchants should stop overcomplicating AI. Start
with one question: what decision could I make
today if I had better data? Whether it’s reducing
false declines or recognising repeat customers,
choose a tool that gives clear actions, not just ashy
dashboards. Klarna shows how this works by using
AI to personalise offers for returning shoppers. The
merchants who win are the ones who actually act
on these insights, not the ones who just admire
the data.
Payment companies & PSPs
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
PSPs must move from simply processing
payments to shaping them. AI lets them flag
risky transactions, boost approval rates and even
recommend offers in real time. Worldpay’s smart
routing is a good example, automatically nding
the best path for each transaction. The real leap is
becoming consultative partners to merchants and
explaining AI decisions clearly, so businesses trust
and follow the advice.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
Angela Yore / Founder & managing director /
SkyParlour
AI & today’s impact
Fraud prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI is only as valuable as the decisions it drives, but
I think too many merchants treat it like a passive
alarm bell. The real advantage is spotting fraud
patterns humans would never see and acting
on them instantly. Adyen, for example, uses
machine learning to adjust risk scores in real time,
blocking bad actors without frustrating genuine
customers. The next step is making these decisions
understandable through clear communications,
so merchants can explain to customers why a
payment was blocked and maintain trust.
Merchant perspective
AI × merchant payments: Insights driving
tomorrow
AI is rewriting the rules of payments — speeding up checkouts, stopping fraud before it happens,
and helping merchants make smarter, faster decisions. In this chapter, MPE ambassadors and
advisory board members reveal their take on today’s breakthroughs, merchant-rst strategies, and
the opportunities just over the horizon. From practical advice to bold predictions, these perspectives
offer a front-row seat to the next era of payments — powered by AI.
14MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
friction to create a smooth experience will be key.
This ow will save customers time on the overall
purchasing experience to an extent never seen
before.
Merchant perspective
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
I always love this question, and my answer varies
from case to case but generally a hybrid approach
is best. Depending on resources and the technical
savyness of your team, you may build more or less.
The issue with building is AI is in 99%+ of the cases
not the core business of the company building
it. They will never innovate as quickly as other
companies solely focusing on this. To that end, it’s
crucial to have a exible foundation where you can
at any given time decide to outsource a specic
component of your stack. Now, buidling makes
sense when you can create a proprietary use of AI
in this case ultra specic to your business. Cost is
always something to consider, if you can get that
done externally for a price that’s more affordable
than buidling, and with a company you trust, I
advise businesses to do just that. Even better if
they can provide a set of services needed and not
simply one.
Payment companies & PSPs
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
Interestingly enough, I thinks payments data is
incredibly valuable, especially when contextualized
and very hard to get accessed to. It can disrupt the
entire way a company operates from a marketing
& loyalty, nance, accounting, GTM, overall vision,
and obviously payments. PSPs have focused on
enhancing performance which is hyper specic
to payments, I have seen one clear and incredible
use case of a company leveraging this data to
help an overalll business better operate, not just
payments. This is how AI should be used in my
opinion, creating more value horizontally. PSPs
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
AI will soon be seen less as a cost-cutter and more
as an experience-shaper. Faster approvals and
seamless checkouts are just the start. The real
value is in making the whole payment journey feel
effortless, as Checkout.com found when it used
AI to optimise a retailer’s checkout ow and saw
conversions climb. When merchants explain what
AI is doing and why, staff and customers buy into
the process, and that turns technology from a tool
into a competitive edge.
Arthur Bedel / Global director of revenue / VGS
AI & today’s impact
Checkout experience: Where does AI make the
payment process faster and easier for shoppers?
On a merchant checkout (direct) , AI will enable a
better personalisation and potentially reduce the
indentication friction as it can in real time assess
the user behavior through data points making the
process even smoother for shoppers. Via an Agentic
Commerce ow, creating a universal experience
where a consumers will continuously use an agent
that will understand their needs and wants, as well
as payment preferences will really impact their
ultimate experience, both at checkout and from
an overall customer experience perspective. For
now, none of this is backed in (agentic). The launch
will most likely have plenty of friction related to
identication at checkout. Once real volume is
processed and scale is achieved, reducing that
15MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Candice Pressinger / Director customer data
security and optimisation / Elavon Merchant
Payment Services
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
AI isn’t just tweaking the payments journey, it’s
rewriting it. By dynamically routing transactions
across issuers, networks, and risk proles, and auto-
tuning tools like 3DS and transaction risk analysis
(TRA), AI ensures genuine customers glide through
effortlessly while only the riskiest get stepped up.
The result? Higher approval rates without friction.
Fraud prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
Fraud doesn’t start at the chargeback, it starts
at different stages of the fraudster journey from
account sign up to checkout and beyond. AI spots
the patterns humans miss, linking behaviour,
devices, and history in real time so that fraudsters
are blocked before they ever make it to the cart.
Good customers get a green light, bad actors hit a
dead end. And with honeypots diverting bots into
cul-de-sacs, AI is turning fraud prevention into a
game of checkmate, not chase.
Approvals: How can AI help merchants approve
more genuine transactions and reduce false
declines?
For merchants, AI is the difference between a lost
sale and a loyal customer. By separating genuine
are in an incredible place to do so, I would add,
orchestrators even more due to the wealth of data
they get access to, especially if they can crack the
“how to normalise and standardise that data”. Yes,
I have a specic company in mind right now ;)
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
Agentic Commerce will redene the fundamental
purchasing behaviour of customers and payments.
Instead of searching for a good on various
websites or a marketplace where products may
be recommended but its not personalized, you
will have access to universal interface where you
can purchase anything at any time. Not only so,
the agent will continuously learn about you as you
use it as part of your everyday life. It will offer the
most personalised and smoothest experience ever
made. This does not exist anywhere today. Machine
Learning and AI has been used in payments for
decades to enhance performance and detect/
mitigate fraud, agentic commerce is a game-
changing movement altogether.
Looking ahead
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
No, no-one is. Merchants aren’t, networks aren’t,
providers aren’t, regulators aren’t, agentic
companies aren’t. Anyone telling you otherwise is
....
Now, it’s getting gured out extremely quickly
with incredible resources being allocated to this.
As mentioned it’s a game-changing movement.
Once all players have gured the rst iteration, just
like everything else, it will need to be improved and
xed as it won’t be perfect. I’m extremely excited
for the times ahead.
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
But the rule is simple, use only what you need.
Keep it private with strict minimisation, purpose-
binding, and bias testing. AI in payments must be
powerful, but also principled in keeping with AI Act
and GDPR regulation.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
AI is shifting PSPs from ‘per-transaction plumbing’
to outcome-based pricing. No longer just pipes
charging gateway fees, PSPs are becoming
partners charging for results, higher approval rates,
lower fraud, and measurable uplift. Merchants
don’t just want pipes; they want performance and
to have a payments partner rather than just money
movement.
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
AI is giving PSPs a new playbook, scorecards
that benchmark performance, issuer-specific
optimisation, proactive decline-recovery, and
automated dispute kits. Add in agent-assisted
checkout and real-time insights, and PSPs are
no longer just processing payments, they’re
engineering outcomes at checkout.
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
Agentic AI is the next leap, autonomous buyer’s
agents that plan, compare, and transact on a user’s
behalf. This isn’t a chatbot, it’s a buyer’s agent that
shops, compares, and pays for you. Where today’s
AI recommends, agentic AI acts. It doesn’t just
chat, it shops, optimises and pays on your behalf.
That’s the paradigm shift.
Impact on merchants: How could AI agents
change the way consumers shop and pay?
Merchants should expect fewer browsers, but
buyers from risky behaviour with surgical precision,
AI reduces false declines and lifts approval rates
unlocking revenue that would otherwise slip
through the cracks.
Merchant perspective
Disputes & chargebacks: Can AI make managing
disputes and chargebacks easier for merchants?
AI is cutting disputes off at the gateway, long before
they snowball into chargebacks. But it doesn’t
stop there, it triages cases, auto-builds evidence
packs, and even predicts win probability. That
means faster recoveries, fewer admin headaches,
and disputes resolved before they drain time and
money. Fraud is fought, but admin is automated..
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
Merchants don’t need to reinvent the wheel to
start with AI. The fastest win is simply switching
on AI-driven risk and token optimisation with
your PSP. It’s plug-and-play, no rebuild required,
delivering measurable uplift in weeks, not years.
Fast ROI, no heavy lift
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
Building AI in-house sounds tempting, but it’s
highly regulated, often costly and slow. Buying lets
you plug into years of expertise and models already
trained on millions of transactions. The smartest
merchants blend both i.e. buy proven AI for scale
and speed, then build niche add-ons for their
unique edge and use cases. In payments, time is
money, and buying gets you there rst.
Data needs: What data is most useful for AI in
payments — and how do merchants keep it
private and fair?
The gold dust in payments data isn’t volume, it’s
precision: tokenised PAN history, device signals,
issuer response codes, and behavioural biometrics.
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Charlotte Al Usta / Principal / Flagship Advisory
Partners
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
•
AI has increasingly been used to personalise
the checkout experience by surfacing the best-
t payment option (e.g., cards, wallets, A2A
payments, etc.) for each consumer and context.
•
AI-powered smart routing, orchestration, and
fraud management allow faster decision-
making and fewer false declines, making
paying quicker, smoother, and more intuitive.
•
In customer support, we increasingly face AI
agents capable of quickly resolving common
issues while routing more complex cases to
human agents, allowing us to streamline the
post-purchase customer experience.
Merchant perspective
Disputes & chargebacks: Can AI make managing
disputes and chargebacks easier for merchants?
•
Yes, payment providers invest in AI technology
to automate manual dispute and chargeback
management processes; thus, we can expect
more operational improvements.
•
AI will increasingly be able to capture and
classify disputes, auto-assemble evidence per
reason code, and draft representments ranked
by win probability.
bigger baskets. The catch? Your product data,
pricing, and policies must be ‘agent-readable.’ If
your digital shelf isn’t visible to AI agents, you risk
being invisible to your next customer.
Impact on PSPs: What opportunities or risks does
agentic commerce create for PSPs and payment
providers?
For PSPs, agentic commerce is both risk and
reward. The prize is becoming the trust and
orchestration layer between agent and merchant.
The risk is disintermediation, if you can’t expose
clean APIs and rich metadata, you’ll be cut out. Get
it right, and you’re the indispensable bridge in the
new payments chain.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
In the next 12 months, merchants can bank on
tangible AI wins: 3–5% conversion uplift through
issuer-aware optimisation, 10–20% faster dispute
handling, and smoother checkouts as strong
customer authentication is stepped down for
trusted buyers under TRA exemptions. These aren’t
moonshots, they’re measurable outcomes within
reach.
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
Europe is ahead of most regions on AI regulation,
thanks to the AI Act, PSD3/PSR, and GDPR but
gaps remain. Agentic consent, explainability at
the edge, and cross-border liability are still grey
zones. The message for merchants is clear, don’t
wait for PSD3. Prepare now with auditable models
and data protection impact assessments, or risk
scrambling later.
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
•
As a result, checkout becomes invisible and
multi-merchant, with machine-to-machine
payments emerging over time.
•
Payment providers will increasingly offer
agentic RM, analytics, and marketing, turning
shopping and tender goals into automated
actions and shifting competition toward price,
experience, and agent interoperability.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
•
Based on roadmaps we observe across
providers, the improvements merchants can
expect over the next year will be incremental
and primarily operationally focused.
•
On the front end, AI-driven product and
marketing recommendations, a more
intelligent search that converts better without
extra integration effort.
•
Operationally, AI will automate back-office
and customer support workflows, taking
meaningful cost out of routine processes.
•
In payments and fintech, providers will
deliver stronger fraud prevention and
chargeback/dispute management, automated
reconciliation, and cash-flow insights as
standard features rather than custom builds.
•
Thus, merchants could anticipate an
incremental operational efficiency and
personalisation change with real commercial
impact in the mid- to longer term.
•
It can help prioritise queues, shorten cycle
times, and feed merchant insights to prevent
repeat disputes.
•
As a result, merchants will benet from less
manual work, lower losses, and higher win
rates over time.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
As companies begin to trust AI more, we can
expect new business models and revenue drivers
to be generated. For example:
•
In card issuing, lower xed operational costs
and increased personalisation will enable the
emergence of affinity programs, dynamic
rewards, and niche value propositions. The
models will shift toward smaller, targeted
portfolios with protable unit economics.
•
In merchant acquiring, AI will help perform
more robust onboarding & underwriting on
individual high-risk merchants based on AI-
driven intelligence, supporting risk-based
pricing and automated monitoring. Revenue
will lift from expanded TAM, a higher take rate
on riskier merchants, and robust loss control.
•
In lending, AI will power more effective credit
underwriting, allowing broader consumer and
SMB access to credit with better-controlled risk
models.
Agentic commerce
Impact on merchants: How could AI agents
change the way consumers shop and pay?
•
AI agents will compare, select, and purchase
on behalf of consumers.
•
For businesses, AI agents will reprice, nd, and
switch vendors based on price/service t, and
self-integrate into vendor systems.
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
There are multiple areas where AI is already
changing the nature of PSP services to merchants,
including:
•
Risk and Compliance services, to catch patterns
invisible to the naked eye
•
Authorisation rate optimisation for best in
industry performance
•
Curing declines to increase conversion and
maximise customer lifetime value
• Winning disputes, leveraging card scheme CE
3.0 and First Party Trust initiatives
• Reconciliation to prevent revenue leakage
•
User data analysis to uncover growth
opportunities
•
Know Your Agent framework for agentic
commerce
• and much more
Agentic commerce
Impact on PSPs: What opportunities or risks does
agentic commerce create for PSPs and payment
providers?
The opportunities and risks are significant.
Investment rm Ark Invest estimates that by 2030,
25% of all e-commerce transactions will be entirely
AI agent-driven. Agents will transact either with
other agents or directly with the data.
A recent webcast hosted by Mastercard highlighted
some of the opportunities this revolution is
unlocking in the payments industry and its players:
•
Certication of legitimate agents, so merchants
can trust the entities transacting with them.
•
Standardised information formats, requiring
merchants to provide data such as the SKU
item price, shipping costs, taxes, return policy,
customer rating, etc.
Daniel Kornitzer / Head of global partnerships /
EBANX
AI & today’s impact
Checkout experience: Where does AI make the
payment process faster and easier for shoppers?
Oddly enough, the biggest impact would be
agentic commerce, where in fact there is no
checkout and no user-experience. The consumer’s
AI agent connects directly with the merchant’s API
or even just the data, and makes a mini Request
for Proposal (RFP) like decision on the best supplier
for a given product based on characteristics such
as: price, product reviews, supplier reputation,
shipping costs, return policy, loyalty rewards,
extended warranties, and other relevant factors.
Merchant perspective
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
It’d say the fastest go-to-market for AI enablement
is to work with partners and providers that are
leaders in their area and are applying AI to deliver
best-in-class performance. In parallel, if some of
these technologies are deemed to be core to your
business, then it could make sense to develop
specic / targeted tools in-house and own the
intellectual property.
Payment companies & PSPs
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
20MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Dave Birch / Global ambassador / Consult
Hyperion
AI & today’s impact
Checkout experience: Where does AI make the
payment process faster and easier for shoppers?
I suspect that for many people in the not too
distant future there will be no such thing as a
checkout experience because the transactions
will take place between the customers agent and
the retailers agent. If I tell my bot to get me the
cheap ight to Berlin or a ticket to watch Kraftwerk
I don’t want to be woken up at 3am to enter my
card details! “Checking out” will be like “dialling”
a phone.
Merchant perspective
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
The merchants’ key asset is their treasure trove of
data; AI is nothing without data to train it on so
merchants must be very careful who they share
this data with and under what circumstances. This
rather points to the development of local or at least
sectoral models for merchants to train themselves.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
If the customers are mainly going to be AIs, I don’t
•
Human authentication at the time of payment
instruction.
• Audit trails of transactions to assist merchants
with disputes related to agentic commerce
purchases.
•
B2B payment use cases, such as automating
vendor selection, speeding up procurement,
automating reconciliation, and accelerating
treasury ows.
The potential for new revenue streams in
both consumer and B2B agentic commerce is
massive. At the same time, agentic commerce
will negatively impact impulse buying, bundling
and upselling, as the agent will stick to its script/
mandate and not consider adjacent items (“often
purchased with”).
Looking Ahead
Near-Term Results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
While AI agent-driven commerce has tremendous
potential, it also requires a new layer of
infrastructure and standards to ensure it doesn’t
enable fraudulent actors. For example, how does
a merchant ensure that an agent is legitimate?
This will require a Know Your Agent (KYA)
framework, that will enable merchants to verify
the provenance (who created the agent and when,
who authenticated and certied it, what’s its user
binding, what is the permission scope, and more).
Once this is in place, merchants will be able to fully
embrace agentic commerce.
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
risk scores based on factors like location, device,
and history because it keeps learning from new
data, it adapts quickly to changing fraud tactics,
allowing us to block high risk payments instantly
while reducing false declines for genuine
customers.
Merchant perspective
Data needs: What data is most useful for AI in
payments — and how do merchants keep it
private and fair?
AI in payments works best with data merchants
already have such as transactions behavior and
history. The priority is to keep it private through
strong controls and to ensure fairness by using
diverse data and constant checks.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
AI is changing how psps and payment companies
make money by moving them beyond simple
processing into intelligence driven services. it
allows them to offer fraud prevention, smarter
routing, risk based pricing, and predictive tools
that help merchants grow. instead of being just
infrastructure providers they are becomning
partners that inuence strategy and open new
revenue streams.go
Agentic commerce
Impact on merchants: How could AI agents
change the way consumers shop and pay?
AI agents will act as personal shopping assistants
by nding the best deals checking availability and
completing payments instantly. For merchants
like Kinguin the focus moves from driving clicks
to making sure products and checkouts are
easy to discover and ready for seamless AI driven
purchases.
think the merchants or the PSPs know how to sell
the services to AIs so it’s very early days.
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
Agentic commerce is commerce where the
customers agent makes the buying decision on
behalf of the customer and effects payment. Most
of what we see today in payments is machine
learning in one form or another, it’s still early days
for real AI.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
In the next 12 months, probably improved customer
experience. Personally, I’m looking forward to AI
evaluating merchants’ offers for me. Are those
double hotel points really worth it?
Faheem Bakshi / VP Payments / Kinguin
AI & today’s impact
Fraud prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI helps us catch fraud earlier by spotting unusual
behavior in real time, comparing each transaction
against patterns of normal activity, and assigning
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
additions to shopper experience. The not-visible,
back end driven, experience improvement is in
providing more accurate real-time fraud checks
so transactions aren’t delayed.
Fraud prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI detects and stops fraud earlier by analysing
patterns in transactions in real time, spotting
unusual behaviour (like unexpected locations,
amounts, or frequency), and agging or blocking
suspicious payments automatically before they go
through.
Approvals: How can AI help merchants approve
more genuine transactions and reduce false
declines?
This is similar to the AI applications in fraud
prevention. AI helps merchants approve more
genuine transactions by analysing historical and
real-time transaction patterns, distinguishing
legitimate behaviour from fraud. This reduces false
declines by allowing valid payments to go through
while still blocking suspicious ones.
Geoffrey Barraclough / Founder / Business of
Payments
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
Agentic commerce is no longer hypothetical.
BCG estimates that AI agents will influence
Looking ahead
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
Europe has strong foundations with GDPR, PSD2,
and the new AI Act, but the market is moving faster
than the rules. The region is prepared in principle
,yet the real test will be how quickly regulators
adapt to AI agents and new payment models.
Francesco Burelli / Partner / Arkwright Consulting
AG
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
AI has been core to payment within fraud
detection and credit decisioning for many years.
Recent tech developments are making these
functionalities more accurate and sophisticated.
On the other side AI is also now automating
transactions through agents and playing a key
role in personalizing payment experiences, for
example by offering tailored discounts at point of
check out or suggesting credit options suited to
the customer’s prole.
Checkout experience: Where does AI make the
payment process faster and easier for shoppers?
AI speeds up and simplies payments by auto-
lling payment details at checkout, enabling one-
click or contactless payments using predictive
preferences. These are the most “visible”
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
For PSPs, AI is a chance to grow value-added
revenues beyond commodity processing. Three
areas stand out:
•
Agent trust & safety - Know Your Agent
frameworks to verify that an agent represents
a genuine customer.
•
Smart routing & recovery - predicting issuer
behaviour and retrying intelligently to reduce
false declines.
•
Autonomous back-office - automating
reconciliation, dispute triage, and transaction
accuracy.
In these domains, PSP’s can help merchants cut
overheads, raise approval rates and reduce fraud
without lifting a finger. In each case, the PSP
becomes less processor, more co-pilot and needs
to set its fees accordingly.
Impact on PSPs: Opportunities & risks from
agentic commerce
Let’s start with the good news. There’s an
emerging gap in the market to adjudicate identity,
consent, and liability. It’s a gap PSPs can monetise
with premium-priced risk products. Forward-
looking PSPs can act as the trust layer between
autonomous buyers and sellers.
However, the challenge for many smaller PSPs
is that value is already drifting toward platforms
blending payments with software, payments,
and embedded nance. This shift raises a clear
risk that distribution will concentrate in a small
number of global processors, as AI agents funnel
spend toward the largest platforms. Smaller PSPs
risk being marginalised unless they can match
the laser focus on fraud, identity, and Know Your
Agent emerging from the biggest brand names in
payments. Striking early partnerships with agent
platforms would be a good start and producing
clean APIs is table stakes.
In the age of agents, PSPs will either become high-
value trusted identity arbiters or invisible plumbing
picking up crumbs left behind by the big boys.
more than half of online spend, with eight in
ten US consumers soon expecting to shop
through assistants. Shopify already reports higher
conversion rates at merchants using its AI-assisted
shopping ows.
The implications are profound: instead of “add
to basket,” shoppers will delegate to AI agents,
and checkout as we know it could become
invisible. At the same time, AI is already pervasive
in the payments stack from fraud detection to
reconciliation and routing; promising higher
authorisation rates at lower cost.
The real change is not just where the buying
decision is made (inside the agent rather than
on the merchant website) but who presses the
“conrm” button (likely not the human). The early
winners are those already incorporating AI into
hard merchant metrics such as authentication,
authorisation, conversion, chargebacks rather
than those posting glossy demos on LinkedIn. The
question for the industry is simple: when agents
press pay, will your stack still be in the loop?
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
The build-versus-buy dilemma in AI should be
approached like any other core tech investment.
Own what differentiates your business; rent what
scales reliably. If AI models can shift your core KPIs
such as conversion, basket size, or frequency, then
in-house development, ideally based on off-the-
shelf components, could make sense. But this
is a market moving at speed. If you can’t show a
six-month path from pilot to measurable uplift in
authorisation or conversion, buy from a market-
leading specialist vendor. Don’t waste time on
internal projects.
And if it’s a domain where network effects matter,
or where there is value in pooling data from
across the market (fraud, reconciliation, “Know
Your Agent”), then buying from specialists is likely
always the best policy. In AI, the cost of waiting is
often higher than the cost of experimenting so just
get on with it.
PSP services: New AI-driven value for merchants
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MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
payments — and how do merchants keep it
private and fair?
In payments, the most valuable data for AI models
includes a blend of transactional details—such as
amount, currency, time, merchant category, and
payment method—combined with behavioral data
like customer purchase history, account activity,
and usage patterns. Device and browser-level
information, including IP address, device ID, and
location, also plays a critical role, as does external
intelligence like fraud scores, chargeback data, and
issuers’ feedback.
Importantly, network decline reasons—such as
issuer decline codes, soft versus hard declines,
and authorization failure messages—give AI the
insights needed to recognize patterns, predict
recoverable declines, and optimize retry strategies
through smarter routing. Together, this data
enables real-time decision-making that improves
approval rates, reduces fraud, and tailors the
payment experience to each market.
That said, using this data effectively requires to
handle the data points responsibly and protect its
storage. Merchants must implement strong data
governance practices—applying principles like
data minimization, encryption, tokenization, and
anonymization to protect sensitive information.
Compliance with regulations such as GDPR,
is essential, along with building trust through
transparency and clear customer consent policies.
Payment companies & PSPs
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
AI enables PSPs to offer merchants a new, smarter,
more adaptive value added services — from fraud
prevention and routing optimization to predictive
analytics and personalized checkout experiences.
By analyzing vast amounts of transactional and
behavioral data in real time, AI can help PSPs
•
Processing more payments (with less) -
processing more payments and reaching
Hagay Elyakim / Founder / BlockchainLab
AI & today’s impact
Approvals: How can AI help merchants approve
more genuine transactions and reduce false
declines?
AI is a game-changer when it comes to assisting
merchants in improving their overall conversion
rate by reducing both false positives (genuine
transactions wrongly declined) and false
negatives (fraudulent transactions mistakenly
approved). By leveraging vast amounts of
historical transaction data alongside access to
multiple real-time data points — such as device
information, geolocation, transaction velocity,
and user behavior — AI systems can be used to
build a highly accurate prediction models. These
models are very dynamic and continuously learn
and evolve by incorporating data from outcomes
like chargebacks, successful fraud attempts, and
corrected false declines. This adaptive learning
models allows the AI to detect subtle, emerging
fraud patterns that traditional rules-based systems
would miss. Furthermore, real-time data ingestion
enables AI to make instantaneous, context-aware
decisions at checkout, drastically improving the
accuracy of fraud detection. As a result, merchants
can confidently reach more markets, approve
more legitimate transactions, enhance customer
experience, and reduce revenue loss from false
declines.
Merchant perspective
Data needs: What data is most useful for AI in
25MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
the risk of disintermediation. To maintain
relevance, PSPs must reinvent themselves as
intelligent infrastructure providers—investing in
agent-compatible systems, adaptive compliance
frameworks, and scalable orchestration capabilities
to support the next generation of AI-native
commerce.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
Over the next 12 months, I anticipate that merchants
will start to experience improvements driven by
AI across multiple domains that will impact their
protability and work overall cost efciency such as:
higher transaction approval rates, improvement in
operational efciencies, and customer experience
optimization. Enhanced fraud detection algorithms
and intelligent payment routing will reduce false
declines, leading to higher authorization rates
and increased revenue capture. Concurrently,
AI-powered automation will streamline complex
and resource-intensive processes such as fraud
investigations, chargeback management, and
reconciliation, and gradually take over and replace
the human resource enabling significant cost
savings and improved operational scalability.
On the end-to-end payment experience - AI will
facilitate more seamless, and personalized payment
journeys—leveraging behavioral biometrics
and contextual data to minimize friction while
maintaining fraud and risk controls. early adopters
who effectively integrate AI into their payment
workflows will be well-positioned to improve
protability, reduce risk exposure, and enhance
customer satisfaction in an highly competitive
digital payments landscape. As a result of these
improvements, it will drive payment innovation
and enable merchants to step in to the role of
payment gateway themselves—gaining greater
control over their payment data and capabilities,
reducing their reliance on third-party providers.
additional markets by detecting fraud more
accurately while minimizing false positives,
ensuring that more genuine transactions are
approved without unnecessary friction.
•
Optimizing payment performance - with
smart dynamic routing enabling to route the
payment transaction to the most efficient
and cost-effective payment paths, increasing
acceptance rates and reducing processing fees.
•
Embedded payment experience - empowering
merchants to better understand customer
behavior, anticipate demand, and tailor the
payment experiences to individual preferences
and regional nuances to improve the overall
conversions.
Ultimately, these AI-powered capabilities help
PSPs to offer their merchants reach global markets
securely, increase revenue, improve customer
payment experience, and scale efciently in an
increasingly competitive and fast-changing digital
commerce environment.
Agentic commerce
Impact on PSPs: What opportunities or risks does
agentic commerce create for PSPs and payment
providers?
Where autonomous AI agents initiate and manage
transactions on behalf of users—marks a signicant
evolution in the payments ecosystem, presenting
both substantial opportunities and complex
challenges for Payment Service Providers (PSPs).
It offers PSPs the potential to enable higher
transaction throughput via seamless, automated
payment ows.
This unlocks deeper insights through AI-driven
behavioral data but at the same time, it raises
critical considerations around transaction
transparency and liability, particularly as human
intent becomes abstracted from the payment
process. Furthermore, the growing integration
of payments within AI-rst platforms introduces
26MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Merchant perspective
Disputes & chargebacks: Can AI make managing
disputes and chargebacks easier for merchants?
I’m excited for how AI can automate dispute
analysis, gathering evidence quickly, and predicting
potential outcomes to resolve chargebacks faster
and more accurately.
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
To my mind using AI-powered tools from payment
providers—like fraud detection or smart routing
options, in many cases this is already built into
existing checkout systems.
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
As with all buy, build, rent options the key is to
consider cost, expertise, time to market, and
scalability. As many say, buy for speed, build for
control and long-term differentiation, rent for
exibility.
Data needs: What data is most useful for AI in
payments — and how do merchants keep it
private and fair?
First thoughts turn immediately turn to transaction
history, device data, and behaviour.
Organisations are keeping data private with
encryption, tokenisation and transparent consent
practices.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the business
models of payment companies and PSPs?
AI enables smarter risk management, dynamic
pricing, personalized services, and automation—
shifting PSPs from processors to intelligent service
platforms.
Julia Streets / Founder & CEO / Streets Consulting
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
AI already making a huge impact personalising
payment experiences, detecting fraud in real
time, enabling voice payments, and optimising
transaction routing for efciency.
Checkout experience: Where does AI make the
payment process faster and easier for shoppers?
We are merely paddling in the shallow end as
AI streamlines online checking out with autoll,
voice commands, facial recognition, and predictive
analytics for faster, frictionless payments. I’m
excited for the potential crossing over to the in-
store check out experience.
Fraud prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI has a huge role to play spotting unusual
spending patterns instantly and blocking
suspicious transactions before they’re completed.
Approvals: How can AI help merchants approve
more genuine transactions and reduce false
declines?
AI analyses behaviour and context to better assess
risk based on historical and holistic, helping
approve real customers while blocking only true
fraud and the bad actors.
27MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
Europe is progressing with AI regulations, but
enforcement and clarity gaps mean businesses
must stay vigilant of the potential risks of
compliance exposure, engaged and ever adaptable.
Laura McCracken / CEO / Blackheath Advisors
AI & today’s impact
Fraud Prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
In 2024, more than 225,000 people were identied
by the UK’s largest banks as “money mules” for
letting criminals use their accounts to launder
funds, a 23% increase from 2023. The growing
problem of “money mules” and their pivotal role in
enabling the rise in fraud — which rose to a record
45% of all UK crime - is undermining condence
in the banking and ntech sector. Enters AI - while
potentially a tool for the fraudsters, AI is our best
hope at effectively combatting nancial crime.
AI spots patterns humans miss (velocity, device,
behaviour), scores risk in milliseconds, and blocks
or challenges suspicious payments before they
settle.
Merchant perspective
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
When I was at Facebook and Amazon, we generally
PSP services: What new services or capabilities
can PSPs deliver to merchants using AI?
PSPs can offer real-time fraud protection, smart
payment routing, personalised insights, automated
reconciliation, and predictive sales analytics.
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
Agentic AI acts autonomously to make decisions
and learn, unlike current AI which mainly assists or
analyses without independent action. So imagine
automating a no-touch sequence of events and
what this will mean in terms of operating costs and
speed.
Impact on merchants: How could AI agents
change the way consumers shop and pay?
AI agents could autonomously nd deals, choose
payment methods, and complete purchases,
making shopping effortless and personalised.
Impact on PSPs: What opportunities or risks does
agentic commerce create for PSPs and payment
providers?
There are great opportunities in store: increased
efciency, personalisation, and opening up a whole
host of new revenue streams.
However we must all be mindful of the risks:
loss of control, fraud complexity, and regulatory
challenges.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
Merchants can expect improved conversion
rates, reduced fraud costs, and smoother, more
personalised customer payment experiences.
28MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
and audit trails.
2.
Accelerate eIDAS 2.0 Wallet to include digital
identity with delegated authority (agent acts
for the user), granular spending limits, scope-
bound consents, and one-tap revocation.
Agentic commerce dies without portable,
veriable permissions.
3.
Make Instant Payments agent-safe in term of
verication, traceability, and redress. Agents will
move money 24/7; victims need fast, data-rich
redress.
Neira Jones / Independent advisor, International
speaker, Author
AI & today’s impact
Fraud Prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI spots suspicious patterns in real-time, analysing
transaction anomalies, device ngerprints, and
behavioural signals instantly, then blocks or ags
dubious payments before funds are moved. This
slashes fraud lifecycles from days to milliseconds
and cuts false positives by up to 95%.
Merchant perspective
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
Begin with a small, well-scoped pilot: integrate
an off-the-shelf AI fraud or authorisation toolkit
on a non-critical payment flow. Assemble a
had a preference to build AI tools in-house due to
our culture as innovators/ builders, our complex
marketplace business models, and our unique
data/ ows that created defensible a competitive
advantage. However, under most circumstances, I
would recommend merchants to buy vs build for
common, fast-moving AI capabilities, such as fraud,
routing, and reconciliation. Not only will merchants
have the ‘latest and greatest’, they also will avoid
the need to continually maintain and invest in the
tools.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
I’m super excited about the opportunity for PSPs
to move from ‘fees-for-processing’ based upon
volume to ‘fees-for-performance’: monetising
approval uplift, chargeback reduction, dynamic
routing, and AI-driven value-added services. This
performance-based business model would usher
in a new level of transparency and alignment
between payment companies and merchants.
Looking ahead
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
Not yet. Without swift action on SCA modernisation,
digital identity agent permissions, and agent-aware
instant-payment protections (as well as clear GDPR
and AI Act guardrails), agentic commerce will stall
in Europe just as it’s taking off. The following three
actions need to be taken:
1.
Modernise secure customer authentication
(SCA) and real time settlement (RTS) for
agentic commerce and harmonise SCA
exemptions across Europe. Also establish
a clear authentication liability framework
with standard audit trails. When an agent
authenticates on a user’s behalf, PSPs will
need to use model-driven, outcome-based
authentication with clear liability parameters
29MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
become losses. That means less fraud slipping
through and fewer genuine customers wrongly
declined.
Merchant perspective
First steps: What’s the simplest, low-effort way for
a merchant to get started with AI?
Merchants don’t need a big budget to start with AI.
The simplest entry point is fraud-scoring or smart
checkout optimization via a PSP. It’s plug-and-play,
requires little integration, and delivers immediate
results like higher approvals and smoother
checkouts.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
AI is shifting PSPs from being transaction
processors to intelligence providers. Beyond
moving money, they now sell insights — predicting
churn, optimizing conversion, tailoring risk models.
Data becomes a service, not just a byproduct.
Agentic commerce
Impact on merchants: How could AI agents
change the way consumers shop and pay?
AI agents won’t just recommend products, they’ll
transact on behalf of consumers — comparing
prices, choosing payment methods, even disputing
charges. For merchants, that means selling to
algorithms as much as people, and making sure
their offers are machine-readable and competitive.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
In the next 12 months, the biggest gains will be
fewer false declines and smoother cross-border
cross-functional team to monitor outcomes, rene
models and govern data before wider rollout.
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
PSPs can now offer autonomous risk engines that
optimise authorisations, AI-powered dynamic
routing for lowest fees and speed, plus real-time
dispute triage, turning data-rich insights into plug-
and-play merchant dashboards and APIs.
Looking ahead
Regulatory readiness: Is Europe prepared for AI-
driven commerce?
Europe’s AI Act and PSD3 now demand
explainability, audit trails and risk-classication
for AI in commerce. Firms already face operational
compliance tests; while some will scramble, the
region’s robust frameworks mean most merchants
could be fully compliant within 12 months.
Sam Boboev / Founder & CEO / Fintech Wrap Up
AI & today’s impact
Fraud Prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
AI spots fraud by connecting the dots humans
can’t. It analyzes thousands of signals — device
ngerprints, spending patterns, geolocation —
in milliseconds, agging anomalies before they
30MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
My view is: always start by ‘buying’ – it gets you
move faster, learn quicker, and avoids burning
resources chasing rapid AI evolution. Most
merchants are not technology companies, it’s
more important that they know how to harness
the power of AI tools, than building them.
Only once you’ve tested, know exactly what you
need, and can’t nd a solution that ts all your
business requirements, should you consider
building in-house. From my experience on the
merchant side, building AI tools internally takes
time, resources, alignment, and executive buy-
in. By the time you’ve ‘lined up all the ducks,’ the
technology has already moved on and you’re out
of date. In this fast-moving space, I lean strongly
toward ‘buy’.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
AI is at the center of ‘everything-payments’ –
whether its security, fraud prevention, customer
experience, operational efficiency – and this
drives an explosion of different business models
for payment companies. It’s no longer just about
payment processing, safely and cost efciency, but
about delivering intelligence, turning payments
for merchants into prot centers, ‘being 5th P of
Marketing’ – you name it.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
AI-driven product recommendations, fraud
prevention, and inventory optimisation (to name
just a few) are already here and will only become
more mainstream over the next 12 months. The
real challenge for merchants isn’t whether AI can
deliver better conversion, lower costs, or improved
customer experience — it’s deciding which AI
payments. That means better conversion for
merchants and less friction for customers —
improvements everyone can feel at checkout.
Vassilina Lapteva Walford / Founder, Managing
director / PaymentVibes
AI & today’s impact
Fraud Prevention: In plain terms, how does AI
detect and stop fraud earlier?
Fraud prevention is probably the biggest use
case for AI right now. I recall my days on the
merchant side, managing endless sets of fraud
rules - complex to maintain and requiring
technical expertise hard to nd, slow to adapt in
a world when fraudsters innovate faster than you.
Huge resources (team-wise) were allocated for
data collection, maintenance of fraud rules, and
manual reviews. The process was complicated
and ineffective. I still remember when senior
team members, instead of focusing on high value
projects, spent time during Christmas period doing
manual reviews…
AI has completely changed that : it processes
massive data in real time, spots unusual patterns
instantly, and enables earlier and automated fraud
prevention – all that without an army of people
behind it.
Merchant perspective
Build vs buy: How should merchants decide
whether to build AI tools in-house or purchase
them?
31MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
role of a PSP did not really exist but the explosion
in the e-commerce sales channel meant that new
players came in that performed activities that the
traditional acquirers couldn’t do. I believe there
is a strong possibility that if agentic commerce
really gets the traction most experts expect,
certain business functions that currently exist in
processing and fullling payments might become
obsolete whereas other functions might still have
to be created. For example, would a checkout page
really require consumers to complete all the elds
needed to provide information on billing details,
payment methods etc. or would this buying
process not just be simply completed by AI agents.
Visa and Mastercard are already working on these
solution. It is unquestionable that acquirers and
PSPs will have to adapt.
Agentic commerce
Denition: What agentic AI is and how it differs
from existing AI in payments?
From a denition’s perspective, it helped me to
consider the difference between agentic AI and
generative AI. In the case of generative AI, which
is what most people starting talking about rst,
we use intelligent systems to ‘generate’ content.
In the case of agentic AI we are actually using
these intelligent systems to make decisions and
execute on those. When it comes to payments,
there are obviously a number of different processes
in which AI can help organisations to optimise or
be efcient (onboarding, fraud management, data
analytics etc.), but what people are really getting
interested in is Agentic Commerce whereby you
use intelligent systems to source deals and execute
transactions by facilitating payments (and even
fullment). This is what everybody is looking at but
it is still early days.
Looking ahead
Near-term results: In the next 12 months, what
realistic improvements should merchants expect
from AI — better conversion, lower costs, or
improved customer experience?
initiatives to prioritise while investing in data
quality and governance. The old saying “garbage
in, garbage out” has never been more relevant.
Volker Schloenvoigt / Director / Edgar, Dunn &
Company
AI & today’s impact
Current change: How is AI already transforming
the way customers pay?
When we think about AI in payments from a
consumer perspective we really think about
agentic commerce and buying things not the
adoption of AI in back-ofce functions that the
consumer, quite frankly, doesn’t really care about.
I think we are in the early stages of it but judging
from various press announcements of leading
payment companies it is clear that there is a
real chance for considerable adoption of agentic
commerce as the foundations are being laid. It
is also super interesting to look at what Google
is doing with its AP2 protocol. We have recently
done some work in the space and estimated the
Agentic Commerce market to reach $1.7trn by
2030 (from $130bn in 2025) resulting in a new era
of personalisation.
Payment companies & PSPs
Business models: How is AI reshaping the
business models of payment companies and
PSPs?
This is a very interesting question. If we take a step
back and think about a time pre e-commerce, the
32MPE Magazine |
MPE ambassadors’ spotlights
increasingly using AI too so both sides are ghting
at more advanced levels if that makes sense. Datos
recently reported that 83% of nancial institutions
‘plan to invest in new onboarding tools to help
detect synthetic identity fraud’ for example.
From everything I have seen to date, AI is primarily
being used to optimise back-ofce processes that
could mean cutting down onboarding times,
reducing fraud rates or generating additional value
from improved benchmarking or data analytics.
However it is worth pointing out that a fraudster is
33MPE Magazine |
The Payments Professional’s
Glossaries of Terms
19 Helpful Glossaries You Need (And Can Actually Find)
Neira Jones - 2025
34MPE Magazine |
Why a list of payments glossaries?...
Payments are complicated. A Google search
on the word “payments” returns ~6 trillion
results. If you narrow it down to “payments
glossary”, you get about 95 million results,
You’ll find Mastercard on the first page with
42 entries on card payments and 50 generic
terms. The European Central Bank’s glossary
will be there too, with more than 1,000
entries, although not specifically focused on
payments but on central banking, monetary
policy, and banking supervision.
The ever-popular Bank of International
Settlements' contribution will also feature,
first published in 2001 and revised in 2003 (a
lot has happened since then), containing
about 300 entries.
As they appear as page one entries on
Google, these glossaries are obviously still
popular today. The BIS glossary doesn’t even
list Payment Service Providers (PSPs),
recurring transactions, or card schemes, but
it does tell you about tri-party repo,
subcustodian, netting by novation, and the
minimum standards of the Lamfalussy report
(!). Of course, some people need to know
about these things, but payments
professionals at large don’t, and those new
to payments, or with a casual interest in
them, have no use for this.
If we continue to examine the Google search,
we see that several companies provide
“ultimate” or “definitive” glossaries for
payments. Whether something is “ultimate”
or “definitive” is a bit like describing
“beauty”: only in the eyes of the beholder.
Don’t you find it surprising that one of the
most popular glossary of payment terms at
the time of writing was published in 2003 and
that the most comprehensive glossary is not
dedicated to payments?
Whilst the fundamentals of centralised
payment ecosystems don’t move that fast,
the world has moved on at a staggering pace
since then, and a lot of new vocabulary has
been introduced.
Full disclosure: one of the listed glossaries is
my own, but I promise it’s not vanity. In my
mission of democratising payments
knowledge, I set out to produce a standalone
over-arching glossary. It contains more than
1,600 entries with a practical, easy to read,
listing of the most used payment terms, with
simple definitions, and more than 250 online
references. It is written in plain English in a
style accessible to all. It is suitable for
novices and experienced practitioners alike,
hence the subtitle “A modern and practical
glossary for the curious and the forgetful”. It
will appeal to those needing a refresher on
terms and abbreviations and to those
wanting to understand terms related to parts
of the industry with which they are unfamiliar,
whilst those new to the industry will use it as
a reference to understand documentation
they access and better equip them for
conversations they might have.
After all, if the BIS glossary, published in
2003, is still one of the most referenced
today, I may be filling a gap... I won’t be so
pretentious as to brand my glossary
“ultimate” or “definitive”, but I will be as bold
as saying that it is comprehensive, modern,
and practical.
I dedicate it to all my payments friends.
Neira Jones
October 2025
Neira Jones - 2025
35MPE Magazine |
The Payments Professional’s Glossaries of Terms
19 Helpful Glossaries You Need (And Can Actually Find)
Cover Organisation
& publication date
Number of
Entries Focus Description
URL
European Central
Bank (ECB)
Not specified
1,113
Central
banking,
monetary
policy, banking
supervision.
Comprehensive central banking
glossary covering monetary policy,
supervision, payment systems,
financial markets, financial stability
and economic terminology.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/se
rvices/glossary/html/glossa.en
.html
Bacs Payment
Schemes Limited
Not specified
314
Direct Debit,
Bacs services,
UK payment
schemes
Covering Bacs payment services and
UK clearing processes.
https://www.bacs.co.uk/resou
rces/glossary/
Bank of
International
Settlements (BIS)
March 2003
303
Payment and
settlement
systems
Authoritative international reference
combining CPSS and ECB
terminology covering payment
systems, settlement mechanisms,
and risk management.
https://www.bis.org/cpmi/glos
sary_030301.pdf
European
Payments Council
Sept 2022
302
SEPA, EU
payment
schemes,
payment
acronyms
Glossary for European payments
covering SEPA schemes and PSD2
https://www.europeanpaymen
tscouncil.eu/sites/default/files
/kb/file/2022-09/EPC089-
22%20EPC%20Glossary%20of
%20acronyms.pdf
Faster Payments
Council
Not specified
180
Faster
payments,
real
-time
payments,
cross
-border
Faster payments glossary covering
real
-time payment systems and
instant payment terminology
https://fasterpaymentscouncil
.org/userfiles/2080/Faster%20
Payments%20Glossary%20of
%20Terms_Final.pdf
Mastercard
Not specified 102
Card payments
Covering card payment processing
and payment infrastructure, with
some generic terms.
https://www.mastercardservic
es.com/en/advisors/payments
-consulting/insights/glossary-
payment-terms
World Bank
2022 97
Fintech and the
future of
finance
Definitions of global fintech,
payments, digital assets, financial
inclusion, DLT, and central bank
digital currencies (CBDC).
https://thedocs.worldbank.o
rg/en/doc/11ea23266a1f65d
9a08cbe0e9b072c89-
0430012022/original/Fintech
-
and-the-Future-of-Finance
-
Glossary.pdf
Payment Systems
Regulator
May 2024
88
Market review
of scheme and
processing
fees
Card payment systems, interchange
fees, processing services.
https://www.psr.org.uk/media/
nftjrytd/appendix-b-to-the-ir-
glossary.pdf
Moorwand
Not specified 84
Payment
processing,
card issuing,
digital banking
Fintech glossary covering card
processing, digital banking solutions,
regulatory compliance, and payment
technology for industry practitioners.
https://moorwand.com/resour
ces/glossary/
Neira Jones - 2025
36MPE Magazine |
The Payments Professional’s Glossaries of Terms
19 Helpful Glossaries You Need (And Can Actually Find)
Cover Organisation
& publication date
Number of
Entries Focus Description
URL
Plaid
Oct 2023 80
Digital
payments,
fintech, API
banking
Developer
-focused digital payments
glossary covering ACH systems, API
banking, and fintech terminology for
technical implementation.
https://plaid.com/resources/
payments/digital
-payments
-
glossary/
Global Payments
Not specified 76
Commerce and
payment
technology,
merchant
services
Commerce and payment technology
glossary covering digital payments,
authentication, blockchain, and
modern payment methods.
https://www.globalpayments.c
om/en
-gb/insights/commerce
-
and-payment-terms
Bank of Canada
Updated Jan 2025 68
Retail
payments
supervision
Regulatory glossary for Canada's
Retail Payment Activities Act covering
supervision, compliance,
enforcement, and payment service
provider obligations.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca
/core-functions/retail-
payments-supervision/retail-
payments-supervision-
glossary/
Marqeta
Not specified 60
Card issuing,
payment
processing
Payment technology glossary
covering card issuing, processing,
API
-based platforms, and modern
payment infrastructure for
developers and businesses.
https://www.marqeta.com/pay
ments-basics
NACHA
July 2021 57
International
payments,
ACH, clearing
systems
Glossary covering correspondent
banking and automated clearing
house terminology
https://www.nacha.org/conten
t/international-payments-
glossary
Federal Reserve
Bank of New York
Not specified
47
Payment
systems,
settlement,
clearing
Federal Reserve glossary covering
settlement systems and clearing
mechanisms
https://www.newyorkfed.org/b
anking/payment_glossary.html
Visa
Not specified 45
Visa Developer
Platform
Glossary
Technical glossary for developers
using Visa APIs covering
authorization, clearing, settlement,
and payment processing terminology.
https://developer.visa.com/pa
ges/glossary
Currencycloud
2024 42
Foreign
exchange,
cross
-border
payments,
SWIFT
Cross
-border payments and foreign
exchange glossary covering SWIFT
messaging and correspondent
banking.
https://support.currencycloud
.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/360018804840-
Currencycloud-Glossary
Banco de España
Not specified 40
Payment
systems
terminology
Spanish central bank glossary
covering payment infrastructure and
settlement systems
https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/ar
eas-actuacion/sistemas-
pago/glosario/
Neira Jones
March 2025 1,600+
Covering all
payment rails
Modern practical glossary covering
payment terms, abbreviations, and
industry terminology for
practitioners, students, and industry
professionals.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Z
-Payments-Practical-
Glossary-
Forgetful/dp/1032903139/
Neira Jones - 2025
38MPE Magazine |
MPE Awards
✨ Category:
Best use of data
analytics: Celeris
Winning the “Best Use of Data Analytics” Award
at MPE 2025 is a big milestone—what does this
recognition mean to your team and your mission?
Thank you, we’re incredibly proud. For us, this
award is much more than just a trophy. It’s a
validation that we’re on the right track. We
experienced that merchants have tons of payment
data, but it’s messy and chaotic; It’s more noise
than a signal. Our mission has always been to cut
through that noise and give merchants clear and
useful insights to make informed decisions. So,
winning this award is a huge moral booster for the
entire team. It’s a testament to our hard work in
turning complicated data into simple, actionable
advice that is truly making a difference. YTD 2025,
Celeris has grown more than 80%.
Celeris Pay was created to transform fragmented
payment data into actionable insights. What
inspired the development of your AI Payment
Expert, and how has it redefined merchant
operations?
Honestly, the inspiration came from talking to
merchants. We saw so many smart business
owners getting bogged down in the weeds of
payment data. They’re experts at creating amazing
products, but they were being forced to act like
full-time data analysts. So we thought, what if we
MPE 2025 awards winners
Every great leap in payments starts with curiosity, courage, and collaboration. At MPE 2025, we honored
the visionaries turning ideas into real-world impact.
This year’s award winners raised the bar across innovation, impact, and industry leadership. Meet the
changemakers who stood out:
✨ Category: Best use of data analytics: Celeris
✨ Category: Best use of open banking for payments: Brite Payments
Behind each name is a story of passion, creativity, and commitment to solving complex challenges in
merchant payments.
In the following pages, we bring their stories to life—through personal reections, lessons learned, and a
look into what’s next. Because these aren’t just winners. They’re shaping the next chapter of our industry.
39MPE Magazine |
MPE Awards
could give them an expert on their team? Someone
who could analyze everything, 24/7, and just guide
them on what to do. That’s our AI Payment Expert,
Eli. It’s designed to be like a helpful colleague, not
just another software tool. It has redened their
operations because they now spend less time
digging through spreadsheets and more time
acting on clear recommendations. It shifts their
focus from guring out the past to making smart
decisions for the future.
Can you share a real-world example where
your platform turned raw payment data into a
breakthrough business decision or outcome for
a merchant?
One strong example is the subscription businesses
that we support. As they scaled, payment data
became fragmented, and it was hard to see which
methods were driving real long-term value. Our
platform connected the dots and revealed a key
insight: subscribers paying with cards, Apple Pay,
or Google Pay had 40% higher lifetime value,
largely due to fewer failed renewals and lower
involuntary churn. With this data, they optimized
their checkout ow to highlight cards and digital
wallets in the right regions. The result? A big uplift
in stable recurring revenue and a much healthier
subscription business.
Case study: https://celerispay.com/transforming-
payments-for-sustainable-innovation/
Advanced analytics can overwhelm merchants.
How did you design your dashboard to ensure
powerful insights remain simple, intuitive, and
actionable?
That’s a challenge we took very seriously. We know
that a powerful tool is useless if it’s too complicated.
Our main design rule was to keep it simple and
actionable. We designed our dashboards to tell
a story, not just throw numbers at merchants.
Instead of showing fifty different charts and
expecting merchants to be data scientists, we
highlight what actually matters. We use simple
messages to say, ‘Here’s an opportunity’, or ‘Here’s
a problem you should look at’. The goal is for a busy
merchant to log in, understand what’s going on
in minutes, and know exactly what to do next. If
they can’t go from data to decision quickly, then
we haven’t done our job right.
As award winners, what’s next for Celeris in
shaping the future of data-driven payment
orchestration?
Winning this award is a great motivation for us. So
far, our platform has been powerful at analyzing
past transactions and showing businesses how to
improve. The next step is to go beyond hindsight
and provide foresight—predicting trends, guiding
merchants on which payment methods to adopt,
and helping them prepare before they enter
new markets. Our vision is to make payment
orchestration not just a tool for optimization, but
a true strategic partner that empowers every
business—big or small—with the kind of insights
and capabilities once reserved only for the largest
players.
Sunil Jhamb / Founder & CEO / Celeris
40MPE Magazine |
MPE Awards
✨ Category:
Best use of open
banking for payments:
Brite Payments
What does winning the “Best use of open
banking for payments” Award at MPE 2025 mean
to your team and your mission?
Winning this award is a tremendous honour
for the entire Brite Payments team. It strongly
validates our efforts to lead the way in account-
to-account payments, which is a fantastic boost
as we continue to grow across Europe, especially
in key markets like Germany.
Brite Payments leverages open banking to enable
Instant Payments and Instant Payouts across 27
European markets. What inspired the creation of
Brite IPN, and how has it transformed payments
for merchants and consumers?
We created the Brite Instant Payments Network
(Brite IPN) because we believe instant processing
is a critical component for merchants to realise the
potential. We wanted to build a proprietary network
to give merchants and businesses a complete, out-
of-the-box instant payments and payouts solution
24/7, 365 days a year. For merchants, Brite IPN
helps power a transparent, direct, cost-effective
alternative to traditional payment methods, and,
for consumers, it enables a faster, more seamless
and secure payment experience without needing
to enter card details or remember passwords.
Your solution has helped companies like
Auctionet reduce processing times, cut costs,
and increase customer engagement. Can you
share a concrete example of how Brite has
enhanced operational efciency or cash ow for
a merchant?
By integrating Brite, Auctionet not only offers
a highly intuitive and accessible payment
option, it also streamlined its cash flow and
achieved signicant operational savings. Today,
already approximately 20% of its payments are
processed via Brite, helping them avoid the
high, unpredictable fees of traditional payment
methods.
With 3,800+ connected banks and Single Sign
authentication, your platform offers a seamless
experience. How do you ensure that complex
open banking processes remain simple, fast, and
secure for both merchants and end-users?
We handle the complexity for our merchants
and users. Our Single Sign authentication allows
customers to pay up to 50% faster than traditional
payment methods. For security, we go beyond
basic transaction facilitation. We eliminate
chargeback risks and card-not-present fraud,
and we’ve built in essential checks like real-time
KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money
Laundering). This ensures that every transaction is
not only fast and simple but also incredibly secure.
As award winners, what’s next for Brite Payments
in expanding open banking adoption, improving
instant payment solutions, or scaling further
across Europe?
Winning the Best Use of Open Banking for
Payments award is a fantastic milestone, and
41MPE Magazine |
MPE Awards
we’re just getting started. We’ll continue our
expansion across Europe, with a major focus on
strengthening our presence in Germany and other
recently launched markets. We’re also committed
to building upon our product offering and growing
our reach in verticals like financial services,
e-commerce, and many more.
Lena Hackelöer / Founder & CEO / Brite Payments
42MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
Building trust and security foundations
As AI agents gain autonomy to transact, the
question of trust infrastructure becomes critical.
Today’s payment systems assume a human is
clicking the “buy” button. When an AI agent
initiates a payment, merchants must be able to
authenticate that action and verify its legitimacy.
Three key areas dene this trust layer:
• Authorization. Conrming a user has granted
an agent specific permission to make a
purchase.
•
Authenticity. Ensuring the agent’s request
genuinely reects the user’s intent.
• Accountability. Determining responsibility if a
transaction goes wrong.
Early attempts to address these challenges include
Google Cloud’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2),
a framework that allows users, merchants and
payment providers to authenticate and process
agent-led payments securely.
Reimagining the consumer journey
Agentic AI promises both more choice and less
friction for consumers. Purchases could happen
in seconds without the need to navigate multiple
pages or apps.
Imagine an AI agent that:
•
Compares merchants in real time to nd the
Agentic AI has quickly become one of the most
transformative forces in the payments industry.
With recent developments such as OpenAI and
Stripe’s instant checkout and Agentic Commerce
Protocol, we’re seeing a genuine turning point
in how people shop and pay. For the rst time,
conversational AI isn’t just an intermediary that
answers questions or recommends products —
it’s becoming a transactional environment where
search, recommendation and checkout merge into
a single seamless experience.
What makes Agentic AI different?
Traditional AI in payments — like fraud detection
models, chatbots or recommendation engines
— relies on humans to initiate, interpret and
act. Agentic AI, by contrast, is goal-driven and
autonomous. These systems reason, plan and take
action on behalf of humans. Rather than simply
assisting with tasks, they deliver outcomes.
That capability marks a major shift. Agentic
systems can now perform end-to-end processes
— from searching for products and tailoring
recommendations to completing transactions
automatically. For consumers, that means
frictionless, personalised shopping experiences.
For merchants, it signals a new reality: they must
ensure their products and offers are visible to AI
systems as well as to human customers.
Agentic commerce:
driving smarter growth
with every interaction
by Alla Gancz and Panagiotis Kriaris
In partnership with MPE
43MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
1.
Business-to-agent (B2A) – making product
catalogues and checkout ows accessible to
AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity.
2.
Agent-to-consumer (A2C) – embedding
branded AI shopping assistants on owned sites
and apps to drive conversion.
3.
Agent-to-agent (A2A) – enabling autonomous
replenishment or subscription payments,
where an agent acts directly on another agent’s
triggers.
Retailers don’t need to rebuild their entire tech
stack. Many already have the foundations —
structured catalogues, APIs and personalization
engines. What’s needed is an adaptation of those
systems to engage with a new class of buyer:
autonomous, software-based and always-on.
However, this shift also introduces new operational
complexities. Agents don’t browse or scroll like
humans — they query and act based on structured
data. That means catalogues, checkout systems
and payment APIs must evolve together to ensure
compatibility with agent-driven interactions.
Implications for banks and payment providers
Agentic commerce won’t just reshape retail; it will
redene the roles of banks and PSPs too.
•
Platforms and ecosystems: new layers will
emerge to mediate between consumers,
agents and merchants. Inuence will move
from controlling user interfaces to governing
how agents access data and execute
transactions.
•
Data and trust infrastructure: the race is on
to build digital identity and authorization
standards that let agents identify themselves,
prove consent and transact securely.
•
Revenue models: beyond transaction fees,
providers can monetise services around veried
identity, compliance and interoperability.
•
New KPIs: success will hinge on data quality,
best price, applies loyalty points and completes
the purchase automatically.
•
Pauses a streaming subscription when you’re
on holiday and resumes it upon return.
•
Upgrades you to business class using your
loyalty points without you lifting a nger.
The result is a hands-off, hyper-optimised journey.
Consumers delegate tasks like renewals, loyalty
management or shopping to their agents, while
merchants shift their focus to making products
machine-readable and agent-friendly. Visibility
now depends not on SEO but on how well an AI
agent can interpret and transact with a brand’s
data.
Today’s emerging use cases
Though still early, powerful use cases are already
taking shape:
•
AI shopping assistants that compare prices and
make purchases.
•
Automated bill management tools that handle
due dates and payments.
•
Dynamic fraud detection that spots anomalies
in real time.
•
Personalized agents optimising deals and
loyalty rewards.
Global payment networks are racing to make
their ecosystems agent-ready. Visa’s Intelligent
Commerce platform enables agents to securely
discover and purchase products. Mastercard’s
Agent Pay standardises how agents initiate and
settle transactions. PayPal’s Agent Toolkit gives
developers the tools to build agentic payment
ows.
Opportunities for merchants
Agentic commerce is moving rapidly from concept
to reality. Retailers can activate agentic experiences
across three main channels:
44MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
The road ahead
Agentic AI represents more than an incremental
upgrade — it’s a step-change in how AI functions.
We’re moving from prediction to autonomous
action, and adoption is accelerating. Where earlier
technologies like fraud models or chatbots took
years to mature, agentic systems are scaling in
months.
For payment rms, the message is clear:
•
Build the rails and standards for agent-driven
commerce.
•
Collaborate on protocols that enable agentic
payments.
•
Partner across ecosystems to dene the trust
infrastructure.
The future of payments isn’t just about faster
checkout. It’s about intelligent agents transforming
the entire commerce value chain — where every
interaction, every purchase and every connection
becomes an opportunity for smarter growth.
structured catalog accessibility and API
reliability — not traditional clicks or conversions.
•
User control tools: consumers will demand
dashboards within banking apps or wallets to
set permissions and override agent decisions.
Risks and regulatory considerations
The autonomy of agents introduces new risks.
Fraudsters can exploit the same technology to
scale attacks. Liability frameworks are unclear — if
an AI agent makes an unwanted purchase, who is
responsible? Transparency and explainability are
also crucial so regulators and users can understand
why an agent made a specic decision.
European policymakers are already acting. The
EU AI Act enforces explainability, PSD3 expands
authentication requirements and the Digital
Services Act strengthens consumer protection.
These frameworks could give Europe a trust
advantage, though over-regulation might slow
innovation relative to the US or Asia. The winners
will be those that balance trust and agility.
45MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
Tokenization replaces sensitive card data with
a non-sensitive token—a placeholder that’s
meaningless outside the system that created it.
Unlike encryption, which can be reversed with a
key, tokens are non-reversible. That means even if
someone gets access to the token, they can’t use
it to retrieve the original card number.
Here’s a simple analogy: imagine replacing a
customer’s card number with a coat check ticket.
You can use the ticket to retrieve the coat (or in
this case, process a payment), but the ticket itself
doesn’t reveal anything about the coat.
Example: Online Checkout
Let’s say you run an e-commerce site. Without
tokenization, your servers, databases, and even
customer support tools might be in PCI scope if
they touch CHD.
Now imagine you use a hosted payment eld—
like an iframe or redirect page from your payment
processor. The card data never touches your
environment. Instead, you get a token back, which
you can store and use for refunds or recurring
payments.
Suddenly, your web server, database, and support
tools are out of scope. That’s a huge win.
Actionable Tip #1: Tokenize Early
The earlier you tokenize, the more systems you
keep out of scope. That means:
If you’re a merchant accepting card payments,
you’ve likely felt the weight of PCI DSS compliance.
It’s not just a checklist—it’s a complex framework
that touches everything from your website to your
customer service tools. And while it’s essential for
protecting cardholder data, it can also be a drain
on time, budget, and resources.
That’s where tokenization comes in. It’s not a
silver bullet, but when used correctly, it can
dramatically reduce your PCI scope—and with it,
your compliance burden.
Let’s break down what that means in practical
terms.
PCI Scope: Why It Matters
PCI DSS scope includes any system that stores,
processes, or transmits cardholder data (CHD).
The more systems involved, the more controls you
need to implement—rewalls, encryption, access
restrictions, logging, and more.
Reducing scope means fewer systems are subject
to these controls. That’s not just a technical win—
it’s a business one. It means:
• Lower compliance costs
• Faster audits
• Reduced risk of breaches
• More time to focus on growth
Tokenization: The Basics
Reducing PCI scope
with tokenization: What
merchants need to know
by Paul Fitzgerald – PCI-Proxy
46MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
Instead, you use a PCI-compliant gateway. They
store the card data and return a token. You use
that token to trigger monthly charges.
Your billing system is now out of scope. Your audit
is simpler. Your risk is lower.
Actionable Tip #3: Map Your Data Flows
Before you make changes, map out where card
data ows in your business:
• Where is CHD captured?
• Where does it move?
• Where is it stored?
Then ask: can this be tokenized? Can this system
be removed from scope?
Work with your QSA to validate your approach.
Even small changes—like removing CHD from logs
or backups—can make a big difference.
Human-Centered Considerations
Tokenization isn’t just about technology—it’s
about people. Your developers, support teams,
and compliance staff all benet when systems are
simpler and safer.
•
Support teams don’t need to worry about
handling sensitive data.
•
Developers can build faster without navigating
PCI constraints.
•
Compliance teams can focus on strategy
instead of chasing controls.
And most importantly, your customers benet
from better security and smoother experiences.
Final Thoughts
Tokenization is one of the most practical tools
merchants have for reducing PCI scope. It’s not
flashy, but it’s effective. When implemented
thoughtfully, it can transform PCI DSS from a
burden into a manageable part of your business
•
Don’t build your own payment form unless you
absolutely have to.
•
Use secure SDKs or hosted elds from your
processor.
•
Make sure CHD never enters your
environment—not even temporarily.
If you do this right, you may qualify for a simplied
SAQ (like SAQ A or A-EP), which is much easier to
complete than SAQ D.
Example: Omnichannel Retail
Imagine a customer buys online and returns in-
store. You want to offer a seamless experience—
but you also want to avoid storing card data across
systems.
With tokenization, you can link a token to the
customer’s prole. When they return an item in-
store, your POS system uses the token to process
the refund. No need to re-enter the card. No need
to store CHD.
You’ve just improved customer experience and
reduced PCI scope.
Actionable Tip #2: Centralize Token Management
If you operate across multiple channels—web,
mobile, in-store—centralize your token logic. That
means:
• Use a token vault or orchestration layer.
•
Make sure tokens work across systems (CRM,
ERP, POS).
• Avoid duplicating token logic in each channel.
This not only simplies compliance—it also makes
your systems more exible and scalable.
Example: Subscription Billing
Let’s say you run a SaaS platform. You need to
charge customers monthly. Storing raw card data
would bring your entire infrastructure into PCI
scope.
47MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 in news
These aren’t just technical steps—they’re strategic
ones. They help you protect your customers,
empower your teams, and grow your business with
condence.
If you want to discuss more, don’t hesitate to get in
touch with Paul.tzgerald@pci-proxy.com
operations. To get started:
1.
Tokenize early—before CHD enters your
environment.
2.
Centralize token logic—especially across
channels.
3.
Audit your data ows—and look for scope
reduction opportunities.
Ready to go global? MPE’s key media partner
The Paypers published the Global Ecommerce
Report, a guide to international expansion packed
with insights to help you succeed. The report is
available to download for FREE here https://buff.
ly/4gbvyh6
By tapping into new markets and connecting
with more consumers, businesses can increase
their prots and build stronger brand recognition.
While expansion comes with a set of pressing
pain points, solving them can lead to rewarding
growth. Here’s what you’ll nd in the report to help
you tackle this:
✅ Contributions from merchants, consultants, and
payment service providers on key ecommerce
trends, including payment orchestration, AI, FX,
fraud prevention, and shifts in payments across
the retail, travel, and gaming verticals.
✅ Two in-depth research pieces: an infographic
on payment orchestration providers, outlining the
key capabilities of industry players across various
regions – and an infographic that analyses Brazil,
Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, and the
Philippines, presenting relevant developments in
these markets.
MPE is happy to be featured as key media partner
for the Global Ecommerce Report – and the
supporting partners for this edition of the report
are Edgar, Dunn & Company, Redbridge Debt and
Treasury Advisory, and Merchant Risk Council.
More information about the report can be found
here.
48MPE Magazine |
MPE 2026 webinar
Do next: Start with 2–3 priority markets, mirror
your catalogue, set market-specic pricing/
taxes/shipping, and roll.
2. Conversion lives (and dies) on local payments
Shoppers buy what they recognise: TWINT in
CH, Przelewy24 in PL, iDEAL in NL, plus many
more local methods and wallets in each market.
Shop Pay is the #1 wallet on Shopify by usage,
used by hundreds of millions of buyers. It’s
growing fast in Europe—especially with younger
buyers—and acts like a trust badge.
Do next: Turn on the top 2–3 local methods per
market + an accelerated wallet at checkout.
Then A/B test placement and copy on mobile.
3. Kill the complexity tax (FX, entities, reporting)
Multi-currency payouts, unied reporting, and
multi-entity ops eliminate the time and cost
drain of manual processes. Result: faster time
to market, automated workows, and better
performance..
Do next: Pay out in-market currencies where
possible; standardise reporting cadences;
centralise tax rules and audit once.
4. Make stores your best acquisition channel
With POS + e-com on one stack, you capture rst-
party data in store, personalise online, and drive
repeat purchases. Known buyers spend more—
simple as that.
The path to global commerce is no longer dened
by borders — it’s dened by experience. In the
recent MPE webinar “Beyond Borders: Payments
for Global Commerce”, Shopify experts Adrian
Steiner and Kyle Kivimaki, joined by moderator
Sandra Mianda, explored how technology is
reshaping cross-border payments for the modern
merchant.
Their message was clear: growth across markets
begins with localisation and ends with trust. From
showing prices in local currencies and offering
region-specic payment methods to integrating
Shop Pay for a fast, familiar checkout, merchants
can now craft seamless buyer journeys without
adding complexity behind the scenes.
Shopify’s unied platform enables smarter scaling
— whether through lean FX setups, multi-currency
settlements, or local-entity models — while AI-
powered risk tools protect revenue and maintain
frictionless ow.
5 takeaways for merchants expanding “Beyond
Borders”
1. Think global, run local (without the chaos)
Shopify’s single admin interface lets you
manage multiple markets and channels from
one place—launch and operate across countries,
retail/online and B2B seamlessly.
Beyond Borders:
Payments for global
commerce
MPE webinar
How Shopify empowers merchants to
simplify and scale across markets
49MPE Magazine |
weekly; tune rules for good customers; escalate
issuer routing issues fast.
Curious to see how global growth really happens?
Access the Beyond Borders webinar recording and
hear Shopify’s experts in action:
Do next: Train store teams to capture consent
at checkout; trigger a “rst-purchase → second-
purchase” ow within 24–48h.
5. Treat fraud as a conversion feature
End-to-end signals (platform + payments) mean
smarter pre-auth checks: fewer false declines,
better auth rates, happier CFOs. As Kyle Kivimaki
from Shopify noted, “Healthy fraud systems
optimize for conversion outcomes.”
Do next: Monitor declines by BIN/issuer/market
MPE webinar
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adriana.rasovska@merchantpaymentsecosystem.com
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Marketing managerManaging partner
& CMO
Natalia Ivanis Adriana Rasovska
