Agentic Commerce Tests Whether Payments Can Stay Invisible

Watch more: What’s Next In Payments: Paysafe’s Roy Aston

In payments, the most meaningful breakthroughs can often be invisible ones.

The consumer taps, clicks or chats, and the transaction simply works. But much of the real work of payments transformation takes place deep in infrastructure, like APIs, data pipelines, risk engines and compliance frameworks that few outside the industry ever see.

“Businesses want to work with payments organizations that are reliable, effective, and have a broad set of products,” Paysafe Chief Operating Officer Roy Aston told PYMNTS during a discussion for the What’s Next in Payments Series, “Unsung Heroes.” “Trust and being able to operate flawlessly are a base expectation for consumers and merchants.”

As commerce fragments across geographies, platforms and emerging interaction models, the future of payments is no longer defined by any single product but instead by how seamlessly payments are able to integrate with everything else.

“Our integration set and the API set allows a single merchant to integrate with Paysafe and then get access to payments in LatAm, traditional card processing, digital wallets, cash to digital, or the breadth of many alternative payment methods in a simple, easy-to-consume way,” Aston said.

At the core of that effort is a shift in how operational and technology teams have come to define success across a landscape historically focused inward on metrics like uptime, throughput and task completion. For its own part, Paysafe has worked deliberately to flip that orientation outward.

“What’s been important for us as a team is to stay focused on the customer,” Aston said. “As exciting as it’s been to see what technology can do for us, really making sure we stay obsessed around the customer experience and what it is those customers need ultimately to be successful.”

Data as the Unifying Layer

If APIs are the connective tissue of Paysafe’s platform, data is its nervous system. In the age of digital commerce and artificial intelligence, data quality and data architecture are foundational enablers to a growing list of key business priorities.

“To operate in all those different countries and to operate really well, whether it’s internal data and insights, risk management, or enabling sales and marketing, all of that gets sourced from having great high-quality data,” Aston said. “And being able to do phenomenal things with that data.”

Value does not emerge automatically from volume, he said. Over the past year, Paysafe has invested in modernizing its data environment, focusing on everything from foundational data quality to portability standards that allow data to move securely across systems.

“We’ve invested a huge amount of money to really transform our data environment, from thinking about data quality at the ground level to how we look after our data with external industry standards, and how we mesh together datasets across multiple environments,” Aston said.

The objective is not data accumulation, but decision acceleration, or enabling faster, more accurate insights across the business while maintaining regulatory and security discipline. High-quality, well-integrated data enables the layered analytics required to move beyond static rules and detect anomalies, assess merchant quality during onboarding, and adapt controls to emphasize intelligence-driven risk decisions.

Frictionless Commerce Through AI and Autonomy

AI plays a growing role in that intelligence stack.

“We’ve been focused on where we can create value with AI,” Aston said.

At Paysafe, that focus spans multiple domains, including marketing analytics, attrition prediction, risk scoring, fraud detection and merchant onboarding. AI is used not as a standalone initiative, but as an amplifier of existing capabilities, embedded into workflows where it can improve outcomes measurably.

Looking ahead, Aston described a natural progression toward agentic commerce, or autonomous or semi-autonomous software agents transacting on behalf of users and businesses.

“As a technologist, I think of that as a modern extension of ‘everything’s an API,’” he said. “We’re not far away from everything being an autonomous agent, able to interact and create these ubiquitous ecosystems.”

In payments, the implications could be significant. Agent-based systems might negotiate purchases, manage subscriptions, optimize payment methods and resolve exceptions in real time, all without direct human intervention. Paysafe’s own role, in that future, would be to provide the trusted rails and intelligence layer that allow those agents to transact securely.

“I think the ability to thread together agents to help commerce is going to be very exciting,” Aston said, adding that adoption will vary.

Trust, as always in payments, will determine the pace. That trust is reinforced, not undermined, by regulation. While compliance is often framed as a cost center, it is becoming an important source of differentiation across payments.

“Doing these things correctly, doing them right in each market, definitely can be a competitive advantage,” Aston said.

For merchants expanding internationally, the value of a payments partner lies less in any single method than in the confidence that everything will work together reliably.

“Flawless execution, going over and above not just the delivery of payments, but value-added services, and actually delivering value to merchants and the consumer. That’s been what sets us apart,” Aston said.