Paytech used to be judged on whether payments were fast, cheap and reliable. Now the conversation stretches into fraud, identity, data, account-to-account payments, stablecoins, regulation, AI-led commerce and beyond.
In our latest Payments Power 50 podcast, Payments in Progress, host Dave Birch, author and commentator on digital financial services and Payments Power 50 influencer, is joined by Julian Farley, Sales Director UK and Europe at BPC, and Reinhard Hochrieser, SVP of Product & Technology at Jumio Corporation, to look at where paytech is heading and what could change next.
AI sits at the heart of much of the discussion. The panel looks at how criminals are using readily available tools to create synthetic identities, automate attacks and find new weaknesses, while payments firms and financial institutions are also using AI to detect suspicious behaviour faster and build a broader view across different channels.
Listen to the Payments Power 50: Payments in Progress podcast here.
That leads into one of the biggest questions around agentic commerce: how does a business know that an AI agent is genuine, authorised and acting within the limits set by the person behind it? Dave, Julian and Reinhard discuss why digital identity and authentication could become fundamental to making those interactions work, rather than simply another layer added to the payment.
The conversation also covers the growth of pay by bank and account-to-account payments, the role wallets could play in bringing payment and identity credentials together, and whether AI could eventually choose how we pay without the consumer needing to think about the rail underneath.
Looking five years ahead, the panel considers a payments environment in which personal AI agents could act on our behalf, apps become less important and the act of paying itself increasingly disappears into the background.
