Checkout.com and Visa Direct discuss why trust will be critical to the success of agentic commerce
A recent Money Travels podcast saw Visa VP and Global Head of Marketing Maxime Guirauton and Visa’s Chief Evangelist, Rich Arundel discuss the role of AI in payments with Checkout.com Chief Marketing Officer Rory O’Neill and why trust will be key for agentic AI to be a success.
First of all, what is Agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce, sometimes called agentic AI, will use virtual assistants to assist in the buying journey, doing everything from providing personalized recommendations, to performing complex negotiations and purchasing tasks. The future of digital commerce will have AI agents at its core, with machine bots selling to bots on behalf of brands and their customers.
Agentic commerce plays a key role in:
- Optimizing payment flows: AI agents can dynamically recommend a payment method, route, and timing based on user behavior and merchant preferences.
- Enhancing fraud detection: Autonomous systems can flag anomalies in real-time, reducing false positives and improving security.
- Improving customer experience: AI commerce helps make payments seamless, secure and invisible.
Checkout.com is the invisible powerhouse behind global digital payments across the world, and we are delighted to share what Rory O’Neill has to say about what the future of payments looks like.
Behind every successful payment is trust
The challenge for payments in an ecommerce space is simple. It’s trust. When a consumer presents their card in store, there’s a lot of trust in the system, with in-person payments boasting a 99.99% acceptance rate.¹ It’s a relatively low stress environment. But when that same consumer makes a purchase online, using that same card, there’s room for more fraud. Online transactions can see acceptance rates as low as 88%.² So, it’s a challenge for merchants doing business online who not only need to optimize every payment, they also have to mitigate the risk of fraud.
It’s why Checkout.com uses AI and machine learning to increase acceptance rates of online payments– with the goal of making the acceptance rate as good online as it is in person.
Today’s payment landscape, and beyond
Today there is still much ground to cover in terms of payment acceptance rates. Rory notes that Checkout.com has invested in machine learning to optimize over 60 million payment transactions a day.
The next phase will be driven by more immersive use cases, whether that’s driven by agentic commerce, embedded in software, or in financial processes. The future will be one where the payment experience is removed from the merchant and consumer. Says Rory, ‘By doing the work now, we can create payments so they are fully immersive.’
Trust is the essential component of AI
But no matter how advanced the technology, it will only be accepted if it is trusted by consumers. When cards were first used to make online purchases, building trust was central to their success. The EU regulation, Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) was key to this, with its aim of enhancing consumer protection and simultaneously promoting innovation in the payment services market. Similarly, a significant paradigm shift in the world of payments like AI commerce needs to have trust baked into the system for it to be accepted and work.
In the not-distant-world of agentic commerce there will need to be mechanisms in place so people can feel secure exploring use cases. This change has implications for brands as the consumer journey changes. AI commerce will have a dramatic effect on the way people stream, scroll, search, and shop on the internet.
When it comes to identity, trust is key
Rory notes, ‘Whether payments are agent or human-led, there’s a global payment network that sits underneath payments so they can flow, and it’s essential that this network is trusted.’
It’s this global payment network which knows people’s identity, the parameters by which they can shop, and how to manage compliance, risk and fraud. For agentic commerce to be fully embraced, people and businesses will have to trust the phone or computer they use to connect to the internet, as it will need to know their identity. The other essential element of completing the AI commerce transaction is that the payment network will also need to know the purchaser’s identity.
Checkout.com trains over 2,000 employees annually in payments knowledge, ensuring that even as AI takes on more tasks, humans remain central to resolving issues and building relationships.
How AI is transforming payments
Checkout.com optimizes the payment acceptance rate between different merchant references with different payment types, countries, data sets, and more. In this highly dynamic ecosystem, even seemingly small things like entering a zipcode in lower case instead of upper case can disrupt or cancel a payment. The good news is that AI recognizes these kinds of anomalies and so can enable the payment to go through without delays. Checkout.com has invested significantly in the automation of AML checks, fraud checks, KYC checks, and onboarding processes to deliver a better customer service. Rory states, ‘AI is an important part of optimizing payments, but at checkout.com we want our people to be involved in building joint roadmaps and relationships, investment plans, tech plans, and spending time with our customers. Human interaction is highly valuable and will only become more valuable as time goes on. The reality is checkout must be there when things go wrong. As much as there is AI and tech, we need humans to help. We will automate the pieces we don’t need, and add in humans for value.’
The road ahead
As agentic commerce becomes more embedded, Checkout.com is positioning itself not just as a technology provider, but as a strategic partner. Rory envisions a future where every company has a Chief Payments Officer; someone who understands the strategic value of payments and the role AI can play in enhancing it.
A trusted partnership
Visa Direct and Checkout.com work together with one goal: to transform how businesses and consumers experience payments. Checkout.com utilizes Visa Direct’s global network and approximately 12 billion card, account and wallet endpoints across 195+ enabled countries and territories to offer merchants and consumers quick payouts, refunds, and peer-to-peer transfers around the world.
Listen to the podcast here.
Disclaimers:
This presentation contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that relate to, among other things, our future operations, prospects, developments, strategies, business growth and financial outlook. Forward-looking statements generally are identified by words such as ‘believes,’ ‘estimates,’ ‘expects,’ ‘intends,’ ‘may,’ ‘projects,’ ‘could,’ ‘should,’ ‘will,’ ‘continue’ and other similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made, are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond our control and are difficult to predict. We describe risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any of these forward-looking statements in our filings with the SEC. Except as required by law, we do not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
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- Visa. (2023). Based on the 12-month period, between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022, Visa report February 2, 2023.
- The Total Economic Impact™ Of Checkout.com