Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas, held October 18-21, had some practical conversations taking shape around what needs to change for newer and bigger ideas to work outside a high-gloss product demo.
Four themes stood out.
1. Agentic AI can make the purchase, but then comes the permission problem
On October 20 at Money20/20, Visa, BILL and Billtrust announced a live pilot allowing AI agents to initiate and complete approved invoice payments through supplier portals. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to authenticate agents without requiring them to use a person’s login credentials. Evervault, a data security fintech, and Browserbase, which provides browser infrastructure for AI agents, also introduced Browser Tokens at the conference. The product allows agents to access accounts and make purchases without directly handling passwords or payment credentials.
The developments tackle a problem that becomes more important as AI takes on more of the shopping and payment process. Businesses need to recognize when software is acting with a customer’s permission without letting malicious bots through. They also point to a new layer of infrastructure forming around agentic commerce, with systems designed to verify an agent’s identity and permissions while keeping sensitive customer information out of the agent’s hands.
Consumers are already experimenting with the technology. Dean Hickman-Smith, chief revenue officer at Testlio, a software testing and quality engineering company, described people giving AI agents pictures of their refrigerators and asking them to order missing groceries. But moving from asking an agent to find something to letting it actually make the purchase requires a different level of trust.
Margaret Ryan, product lead at American Express Digital Labs, said nearly 75% of consumers surveyed still consider shopping with a preferred merchant important when AI is doing the shopping for them. Yet only 36% said they were comfortable letting an agent complete a transaction on their behalf.
Consumers may be willing to let AI narrow their choices, but giving an agent permission to spend their money means trusting it to act within clear boundaries and follow their instructions.
2. Fraud teams are fighting AI with AI
The same technology that can help customers transact can also help criminals scale attacks. That makes fraud prevention a central part of agentic commerce.
At Money20/20, Chainalysis chief legal and administrative officer Sarah Ward called AI “the biggest force multiplier that fraud has ever seen.” She argued that firms need to share more intelligence because criminals already operate across networks and exchange information.
DataVisor approached the problem from the defensive side, launching Vera Code at the conference. The AI agent is designed to help financial institutions build and update fraud and anti-money laundering systems using natural language instructions. DataVisor’s launch aims to help financial institutions identify and respond to suspicious activity more quickly.
3. Stablecoins are more useful when customers barely notice them
At Money20/20, companies approached stablecoin adoption from two angles: reducing transaction risk and making digital assets easier to spend. Mastercard launched Stablecoin Security, which uses traditional financial and blockchain signals to assess risk before transactions move on-chain. Mesh and Visa, meanwhile, announced a partnership that lets consumers spend crypto and stablecoins at Visa merchants. Mesh converts the digital assets into local currency at checkout, allowing merchants to receive payment as they normally would.
The developments aim to make digital assets more practical without requiring customers or merchants to change how they pay or get paid.
Amy Burr, head of product at Federal Reserve Financial Services, noted, “At the end of the day, our customers and their customers are counting on us; they don’t care about the rails, they don’t care about the modality.”
Everyone is watching stablecoins to see whether they can offer a practical alternative without creating additional friction for the parties involved.
4. Payment providers are competing to make complex transactions easier to manage
The conference saw J.P. Morgan Payments announce support for Mercado Libre’s Global Selling program, helping U.S. merchants sell to buyers in Latin America through business identity onboarding and payment flows. Danielle Sharpe, global head of FI Clearing and PayTech Payments at Standard Chartered, described “orchestration” as determining how a payment should move based on a client’s needs, rather than asking the client to choose the underlying payment rail.
The challenge for payment providers is helping businesses manage different payment methods and transaction types without adding unnecessary complexity. Adit Gadgil, head of global e-commerce and technology for merchant services at Fiserv, said merchants are assessing whether their existing commerce and payment systems can support stablecoins and transactions initiated by AI agents, or whether they need separate infrastructure.
Building separate systems for every new capability can increase costs and leave businesses managing disconnected tools. But trying to accommodate new types of transactions with systems that were not designed for them can create operational and security risks.
For all the new possibilities on display at Money20/20, the question remains how easily businesses can put them to use without making payments more complicated.
