What happens to commerce and payments in a programmable world?

Rose Van Tuven: Foreign. Welcome everybody to MPE, day two in 2026. Here we are at the voice of MPE. And my, uh, name is Rose Van Tuven. I'm the chair of mpe, which is a great pleasure. Conference been going amazingly and today I'm here with Mathieu Altwig, who's heading up products and solutions for VISA in Europe. And my big question to Mathieu is really what happens to commerce and payments when things become programmable? So you used the phrase programmable commerce in your keynote. Can you explain a little bit what this means in simple terms, please?

Mathieu Altwig: Of course, Ruth. First, it's good to be back at mpe, and thanks for having us. It's always a pleasure and such a great event. Um, you know, when we talk and think about programmable commerce, we think that payments are going to move from static moment to being able to, uh, be described as intent and react and be executed by system against these instructions. So that's how we're thinking about it at the high level. And we already see this happening across the ecosystem and we see that shift happening, um, and we can talk a bit more. But that's the foundations of what programmable payments and programmable commerce is today. We're moving from static to intent, and systems can then execute on your behalf.

Rose Van Tuven: Perfect. So why is this shift happening now? Has something changed in the couple of years, months? What were the accelerators to suddenly move this around?

Mathieu Altwig: Yeah, for sure. I think, uh, it's hard to have a discussion without talking about Genai and the role it's playing. But it's interesting to look at it in that context of a programmable world and programmable payment. Um, not only it's being adopted at incredible pace, but it's transforming, um, and it's democratizing the access to code. Historically, only a handful of people could be programmers and could talk to technology in its own language. Genai is changing that. It's a paradigm shift where you can start instructing and interacting with technology using the most simple human accessible interface, which is language M. And that's the beauty. And we're going to see AI allowing that intent to be described in the most natural way and then for system to act on that. And that's the foundation. If we're talking payment, we'll need an intent and act on intent. Now we need to be able to use that intent to talk to a machine or to that same system that's going to execute on your behalf. So that's really the change that we see. And I mean, numbers are all over, um, the world in terms of that trend being irreversible and indicate where the future is heading. A couple of data points which I think are useful for people. If you just look at the top three largest Genai platform, they represent today 1.5 billion active monthly user. This number of six months ago was half of that. So we've never seen such a steep adoption curve. The other thing that's really interesting is when we look at how is that Genai or this Genai platform being used for today. And in number two or in second position is shopping. We're using and users are using this platform more and more to support their shopping experience and their commerce. What we see for now is mostly to help your discovery to buy journey, getting you all the points to hey, I've identified that specific item in that specific merchant but then I'm still being redirected into that merchant and then I eventually have to do what we've done for the last 30 years which is choosing that item, putting it into your shopping basket and then eventually processing to checkout and executing that payment. That step is where programmability comes and where you're going to see being able to have that end to end journey being bridged by you know, that programmable system that can then do it on your behalf. So that's super concrete and we're going to see that happening. The other thing that we also say is, you know a year ago we said we will already be there in life and we really getting there. But it's true that we probably overestimate the impact short term and underestimate the impact long term. We now really think that given big names, big agents are live in the US that in the next six to 12 months we're going to see end to end and you will experience route end to end transactions using an agent. Um, finally maybe I'll leave these insights also on what we're observing. We're having obviously a ton of discussions with agents and players in the ecosystem on that topic is we also see the um, proliferation of agents and agent type. Yes I mentioned the large names and the big platform with a ton of active monthly users but we also see the agent type proliferating across the different use cases and ecosystem. It's not at least today it's not a world where you only have a few handful agents. You do have new agents emerging every single day, very specialized agents on the issuer side, for example bank, financial institution on the merchant side, merchant led conversation of course on some of these big platforms and we've announced, you know, earlier this year a couple of live examples of these agentic transactions. And some are, uh, specialized styling agent on a, you know, retailer merchant that helps you understand what's, you know, best adapted to your style, your preferences, and help you through and through all the way to payment on that same merchant website.

Rose Van Tuven: So I remember last year I mentioned my favorite example of finding me the cheapest, nicest cowboy boots from somewhere around the world.

Mathieu Altwig: Good.

Rose Van Tuven: We're actually now thinking about this becoming an experience. So it's a lot more than just find me the cheapest version of that particular item. But it's the advice that you get around. Maybe these boots will look better than those, or this style would be better than that. I think we discussed a lot this week around agente commerce. Um, you know, the fact that there's apparently already quite a lot of fragmentation. There are protocols for agents, for payments, their platforms. So the terms of orchestration now pops up in the agentic AI world as well, which I think is quite interesting because we seem to be sort of replicating the existing world in that sort of AI bot world, where, of course, you need to know your bot or your agent. So you mentioned the, I mean, the identification of the agent and I guess monitoring the agent throughout that life cycle will become very, very critical because Agen can get poisoned. Right. It's. The cyber piece is something that I think will shift how people will approach it and how quick they may embrace these tools. Right. Just maybe totally out of the blue, a completely different question for you.

Mathieu Altwig: No, it's good. I think there's a few things, um, into your question and, uh, we can touch on some of them. Orchestration, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about that and the fact that we see multiple standards. And I was talking to Daisy, my Visa colleague, about that earlier today, and it's interesting because, yes, we have introduced a year ago, you know, a standard. Other players have introduced these standards. And now what's great now at mp, you can see you have, you know, the next level of the ecosystem, payment orchestrators, PSPs, that are really now starting to build and build the same concepts, ideas, big narrative, big trends into their thinking, into their proposition. Some will play orchestration layer roles, some things that a lot of the standards will coexist and have to play a, uh, part in bringing them together for the merchants. But I think that's what we do at the payment network level. We have to set a direction of travel, we have to work hard on standards, and then the rest of the ecosystem can Build on top of that. And it's really nice to be at MP to see that because now it's becoming much more mainstream narrative. Um, and of course the jury is still out in terms of which standards will standards coexist. We're working hand in hand with many of them. When um, Google came up with ucp, we work with them on that. We think it's a very interesting end to end journey. There is plenty of role for the visa, Intelligent Commerce and our trusted agent protocol to be part of the ucp. So standards also operate at different levels. Um, and there is lots of value when they come together.

Rose Van Tuven: Yeah, I mean a lot of merchants have heard a lot this week about all these different trends, the actual use cases, the percentages of already agents shopping for you or being part of the shopping experience. It hasn't fully come maybe to the European market yet, but it is on its way. If you're a merchant and uh, listening to all of those changes, where should they really start to explore? Because we have some merchants that would just reject the bots outright for now as a security measure. Uh, other merchants may not know it's a bot engaging with their systems. And that is a problem because also you need to know who is on your network. And ultimately another element of this for merchants that's really important is to understand that there may be less and less data about your client as these AI platforms come into play. And I think given it's nascent, I think those things will change because we also have AII rules and payment rules and identity rules. They're all converging now in Europe. So I think there's a whole backdrop of regulatory still in the making, plus the technologies that's been explored, the standards defined at different levels. If you're a merchant, where do you even start to make sure that you're not having more risk in your system without being aware of it, but also prepare at the right levels, at the right themes.

Mathieu Altwig: Yeah, uh, plenty to talk through on this one. Um, I think it's exciting for the merchant community. Um, but to your point, there are a few things that they need to do and they need to address. Um, the first one is you need to think about which secure technologies are in place and are part of what's going to power these agentic based transactions. And you have to lean into these secure technologies, um, to be ready for that. It's relatively simple because we've been talking about them for a long time, we've been introducing many of them and we are, you know, adding Programmability on top of these secure technologies so that you know, we leveraging what's already in place. But yes, we have to make some tweaks because the, the equation is slightly different now. We have a, we have an agent or agents in, in the mix. But concretely it means that one, you need to leverage tokenization and that's next generation of tokenization which is agentiq token. So being ready for that, capable of understanding them, processing them, working down the value chain with your acquired PSPs to be able to support that. Um, and so here it's making sure that whichever pipes you are using to connect yourself to the network, make sure that they are agentic ready. Um, so that's number one. Number two is we also making sure that these credentials are made available for you and so you need to also take advantage of that. The other thing that we added programmability to is Click to pay. We think Click to pay is not just that seamless secure checkout experience, it's also that access to digitally native credential that you can retrieve on demand as a merchant. So you can take advantage of that in multiple browser type checkout rather than just in a guest checkout moment. Um, the other thing that you need to do is to make sure you have a guest checkout because agent we leverage that guest checkout channel and flow to interact with you as a merchant. We assume most merchants have guest checkout, but actually some don't because they go straight to a sign up and signing process to answer some of the points that you made in terms of consumer data. And I want my own account and my own loyalty so they don't have that checkout, uh, or guest checkout flow. So we need to create that. And then third, how do you also leverage the latest authentication technologies? Because the authentication flow in an agent context changes. Yeah, the agent is uh, operating on your behalf, executing on your behalf. But we still are in Europe and we still need to comply with our CA and our regulation and we need to make sure we're protecting the customer. And so leveraging passkeys as that next generation that we took for some time but it's now it's not that you need to take advantage of it because that will enable agents to sign and confirm that intent that we talked about one, which we didn't have to do before and two, enable the merchants to leverage that same verification authentication to process a transaction to be SCA compliant and to also reduce fraud exposure and improve authorization rates. So relatively simple, um, three steps or at least three Important items to remember. Maybe one last thing because you mentioned merchants may be worried about not having access to consumers data information. What about my loyalty program? How do I make that happen? That's an area where there is, you know, lots more to be done. But you know the trusted agent protocol that we've introduced now a couple of months ago, enable the merchants today to identify an agent. Because that's the other thing, you know, merchants needs to understand that this is not a user. Yes. Or one of my consumer. It's actually the agent of one of my consumer. And my first question is can I trust that agent? So the trusted agent protocol enables you to do that at the web infrastructure level by saying I use my web infrastructure, my DNS servers, that every single merchant has to identify if that agent is a visa recognized and certified agent or not. So that's step number one. Don't let the bad guys in, but make sure you let the good ones coming on your websites to power programmable commerce. That's one. Now that can evolve further because that same trusted agent protocol will be enriched over time, will carry more information and payload information, will enable more back to back or end to end or agent to agent type of transactions, but that will also enable more information to flow which means that not only you could have that agent credential already available in the back end, but also the information that comes with that agentic token which is who is that consumer? Can I recognize that consumer? And therefore you can still then activate your loyalty program as a merchant because you recognize who that person is even if that person is signing in or not signing in on your merchant website. And so that's the beauty of it is that we're going to see this next evolution because it's exactly what merchants are asking. And by listening to the market feedback like that then we enhancing these different protocols. Um, and so I think the merchant community is pretty excited about it.

Rose Van Tuven: Yeah, And I think it's a great opportunity because you're starting to get clean structured data in from day one as soon as your new customer signs up as an agent. And you have then that data journey over time the buying habits. So you have a lot more opportunity to actually then play with the data and also manage fraud risk which I think is two positives. So we almost wrapping up here but last question, when we're back here next year, which of course we will be, and it will be the 20th anniversary of MPE, what will be the clearest sign that commerce is really becoming programmable in a few sentences?

Mathieu Altwig: Well, I think, uh, we are six to 12 months away for all of us to have experience end to end transaction. So I think we're going to be much more um, will be in the examples in the illustration. It's a bit like today if I ask you, hey, how are you using Genai? Of course you're going to give me five answers, you're going to say yes. I've used it to prepare for that uh, podcast. I uh, use it yesterday to do a summary. We had an announcement, we checked a couple of ideas before doing the announcement. You use it already multiple times a day. I'm not sure you're going to do multiple agentic transactions uh, a day in 12 months from now, but maybe, um, and that'll be pretty interesting. Many people today are doing actually multiple transactions on the Amazon, uh, on Amazon as a merchant. Um, and so with Amazon doing such big moves uh, in the US and plans to progress quickly around the world, I think that's going to be something that everybody will talk about. So I think we'll be debating much more. How is it working, the things you've seen not working. And so that's going to be a real sign that uh, uh, we've made that progress.

Rose Van Tuven: Yeah, I think we're going to look into a very massive and rapid behavior change that comes then with changing the implementations and solutions. Mathieu, it was great to have you here. Thank you, thank you so much to MPE and uh, have a lovely third uh, day tomorrow.

Mathieu Altwig: Thank you.

Rose Van Tuven: Thanks.