Reframing Payments as a Profit Centre
with Anika Tazmin of Ecommpay
The episode opens with Anika Tazmin, Channel Sales and Partnerships Lead at Ecommpay, who introduces the company’s recent white paper, Making payments a profit centre. The research focuses on how e commerce businesses are shifting their internal perception of payments from a necessary cost to a source of revenue and competitive advantage.
A key takeaway is the importance of senior buy in. Payments often sit in isolation within organisations, limiting their strategic impact. By bringing decision makers into the process and improving visibility into payment performance and data, businesses can unlock better long-term outcomes.
Tazmin highlights several practical ways merchants can drive immediate value. These include reducing avoidable costs, improving checkout conversion and tailoring payment experiences to customer behaviour. Offering familiar and local payment methods, particularly on mobile, can significantly reduce drop off and improve customer satisfaction.
Crucially, she emphasises the need to avoid a one size fits all approach. Instead, merchants should seek tailored solutions that align with their customers and business goals. As payments become more complex, working with expert partners who can provide ongoing optimisation and strategic guidance is increasingly important.
Payments as a Revenue Lever for Marketplaces
with Danish Kanojia of Wolt
Danish Kanojia of Wolt builds on this theme by exploring how payments can directly contribute to revenue generation. Drawing on his experience moderating a roundtable at MPE, he outlines several ways marketplaces can unlock value through smarter payment partnerships.
Local payment methods can support user acquisition by connecting with consumers in specific markets, while subscription models help retain high value customers. In addition, merchants can act as platforms for payment providers to launch new methods, creating mutually beneficial partnerships.
Kanojia also touches on the importance of frictionless checkout. From a merchant perspective, the goal is to remain invisible within the payment journey unless intervention is required for compliance or security. This balance between seamless experience and necessary safeguards remains central to modern payment design.
Agentic Commerce: Opportunity and Uncertainty
A significant portion of the episode focuses on agentic commerce and its potential to reshape how transactions are initiated and completed.
Kanojia describes it as a promising but still developing space. While there is clear potential to improve conversion and loyalty, there are also concerns around fraud, trust and the speed of adoption. He stresses the importance of focusing on foundational technologies and protocols, allowing merchants to prepare without committing too early.
with Andrzej Tomaszewski of Zing Coach
This cautious optimism is echoed by Andrew Tomaszewski of Zing Coach. While his organisation is investing in readiness, it is not rushing to adopt. He highlights a critical challenge: consumer trust. Even digitally savvy users remain hesitant to allow agents to complete purchases autonomously, particularly when it comes to payment authorisation.
Tomaszewski outlines two possible paths for agent driven transactions. The first involves user confirmation before payment, while the second envisions fully autonomous purchasing based on user behaviour. The latter, he suggests, will take significantly longer to gain acceptance.
Infrastructure, Orchestration and the Role of PSPs
Cristiano Betta, CEO and founder of Gr4vy, provides insight into how payment orchestration fits into this evolving landscape. He describes Gr4vy as the “glue” connecting merchants to their payment stack, a role that becomes even more important as complexity increases.
From his perspective, merchants are actively exploring agentic commerce but are still determining how to implement it effectively. Many are beginning with controlled environments such as in app or on-site chat experiences before expanding to external platforms.
with Cristiano Betta of Gr4vy
Betta suggests that orchestration will continue to play a critical role, though its function may evolve. Beyond optimisation and routing, it may also support authentication, mandate management and the coordination of emerging agent-based protocols.
Industry Perspectives: B2B, Travel and Global Commerce
Several guests offer sector specific insights into how these trends are playing out in practice.
with Shyam Sreenivasan
Shyam Sreenivasan from Würth highlights the complexities of B2B commerce, where automation is already well established through systems such as EDI. For agentic commerce to succeed in this environment, it must match the reliability and trust of human sales relationships while handling complex pricing, contracts and regulatory requirements.
He identifies three key conditions for adoption: customer demand, internal readiness and broader market acceptance.
Mark Blake of TUI brings a travel industry perspective. He notes that agentic tools are already transforming the discovery and planning phase of travel, with customers increasingly using AI to research and organise trips. However, when it comes to completing high value purchases, consumers are likely to remain more cautious.
with Mark Blake, TUI
For TUI, the current focus is on strengthening underlying infrastructure and monitoring key developments such as industry standards, fraud management and liability frameworks. This approach ensures readiness while avoiding premature adoption in a rapidly evolving space.
Trust, Fraud and the Future of Payments
Across all conversations, trust emerges as a central theme. Whether discussing agentic commerce, global expansion or checkout optimisation, the ability to deliver secure and reliable payment experiences remains critical.
Fraud prevention is highlighted as a growing challenge, particularly as new technologies introduce new vulnerabilities. Several speakers point to the need for enhanced frameworks, including concepts such as Know Your Agent and new transaction models that account for agent-initiated payments.
Payment service providers are expected to play a pivotal role in this evolution. From enabling tokenisation and authentication to providing thought leadership and standardisation, their ability to support merchants through increasing complexity will be essential.
Key Takeaways
This episode presents a clear picture of an industry in transition:
- Payments are moving from cost centre to strategic growth driver
- Tailored, customer centric payment experiences are essential for conversion
- Agentic commerce offers significant potential but requires careful, phased adoption
- Trust, fraud prevention and regulatory clarity remain key barriers to overcome
- Collaboration between merchants, PSPs and technology providers is critical
As the payments landscape continues to evolve, the organisations that balance innovation with stability, and strategy with execution, will be best positioned to succeed.
