PSE conference to tackle AI-led commerce in London

PSE Consulting will hold its Merchant Acquiring Conference in London, marking 15 years of bringing together senior payments executives.

Senior representatives from Adyen, Revolut, ACI Worldwide, Airwallex, Checkout.com, EPI/Wero, Forter, Tide, TrueLayer and Vinted Pay UK are due to take part, alongside others from across the merchant acquiring market.

The agenda focuses on changes in how payments are initiated, processed and managed as AI tools, software platforms and online marketplaces play a larger role in commerce. Topics include agentic commerce, embedded finance, marketplace payment responsibilities, fraud linked to synthetic identities, payment orchestration, and regulatory developments including PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation.

The gathering comes as the payments sector considers how far AI will shape shopping journeys, without yet becoming established at scale at the final stage of a purchase. Research cited by PSE suggests consumers are using AI for discovery and advice while still relying on merchants and marketplaces to complete transactions.

In a survey of 4,250 AI-active shoppers across the UK, US, Germany and France, 74% said they preferred an independent AI assistant rather than one built into a single retailer. The same research found that 93% expect to use retail marketplaces as much as, or more than, they do now.

Those findings point to a market in which the customer interface may shift without displacing existing payment and checkout infrastructure. For acquirers and payment service providers, that raises questions about who carries transaction risk, who controls the customer relationship, and where standards will be needed if AI-led purchasing becomes more common.

Embedded shift

PSE also highlighted changes in the small business market, where software providers are playing a bigger role in selling payment services. Its UK research found that 23% of small and medium-sized businesses now take an embedded payments service from one of their software-as-a-service platforms, up from 11% in 2024.

The same study found that 46% of UK SMBs have been offered an embedded payments service by a software platform, compared with 22% two years earlier. That trend matters for merchant acquiring because it changes where payment relationships begin and who influences provider choice.

Marketplaces are another focus, as platforms take on broader payment and compliance tasks on behalf of sellers. That can create new revenue streams, but it can also increase exposure to fraud, operational failures and disputes.

The programme will examine how merchants, acquirers, card schemes and payment providers are responding as payment functions spread across a wider set of digital intermediaries. Previous conferences have addressed themes such as open banking and payment orchestration, reflecting shifts that later became more central to the sector.

Since launching in 2011, the event has featured more than 160 speakers and welcomed more than 2,000 attendees from more than 650 payments companies, according to PSE. That record has helped establish it as a regular meeting point for senior executives in acquiring and the wider payments infrastructure market.

Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting, set out the company's view of the current debate around AI-led commerce.

"There's a lot of excitement about agentic commerce, and rightly so, but we need to be realistic about where we are. Today the agent is rarely present at the point of purchase. Consumers ask an AI the complicated questions, then go elsewhere to complete the purchase. Where platforms such as Meta have tried to close that gap themselves, they've had to take on much more of the transaction risk, and that model is difficult to scale.

Getting agentic commerce to work at scale is a payments problem as much as an AI one. It needs standards that give consumers a low-friction experience without loading intermediaries with risk. That's a conversation for acquirers, PSPs, schemes and merchants together, and it's exactly the one we want to have in the room on 17 November," Jones said.

His remarks underline a broader issue for the sector: much of the debate around AI in shopping still comes back to familiar payments concerns such as liability, authentication, merchant acceptance and fraud controls. As more commerce journeys begin outside merchants' own channels, those issues are likely to move higher up the agenda for acquiring executives.

The event is aimed at senior leaders from merchants, acquirers, payment service providers, card schemes and technology vendors, with discussions focused on practical market issues rather than product launches. It will be held at Merchant Taylors' Hall in London.