The Payments Shed

AI agents are learning how to shop, negotiate and pay. But who is actually authorising them? In this special episode of The Payments Shed Podcast, filmed live at Money20/20 USA 2026 in Las Vegas, we're joined by Pat Kinsel, Founder and CEO of Proof, to explore one of the biggest challenges emerging from agentic commerce: establishing trust in a world where machines increasingly act on behalf of humans. Pat shares his vision for the future of digital identity, exploring why the next generation of commerce will require a fundamentally different approach to verifying who is behind a transaction, what they have authorised and who should be held accountable when things go wrong. The conversation tackles the emerging threat of agent forgery, deepfakes and AI-driven fraud. As autonomous systems become more capable, how can merchants distinguish legitimate agents from malicious actors, and who carries the liability when an agent is compromised or acts outside its authority? We also explore Proof's journey from Notarize to building a broader identity network, including Pat's ambition to create identity infrastructure with the reach and reliability of global payment networks. From reusable digital credentials and banking onboarding to the growing role of open standards, they discuss what it will take to make trusted digital identity a mainstream reality. Looking ahead to 2027, Pat shares his perspective on who could ultimately shape the future of agent identity, whether that's established card networks, technology giants or independent identity providers, and what payments leaders should be preparing for today. Plus, Pat takes on The Payments Shed's legendary Shelf of Shame, challenging an outdated identity verification practice. Payments infrastructure has spent decades solving how money moves. Could the next great challenge be proving who's actually moving it? --- The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Cyclops. Cyclops helps payments companies offer crypto acceptance, stablecoin settlement and payouts through one unified infrastructure platform. Find out more: https://cyclops.finance/ --- The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Salesloft. Salesloft uses agentic AI to turn buyer, conversation, deal and forecast data into clear actions that help revenue teams sell smarter. Find out more: https://www.salesloft.com --- The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Mastercard Open Finance. Mastercard Open Finance enables businesses to use consumer-permissioned financial data to create more connected and personalised financial experiences. Find out more: https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/open-finance.html --- The Payments Shed Podcast is partnered with PCN. PCN is a global boutique recruitment agency connecting leading talent and businesses across fintech, cybersecurity, SaaS, e-commerce and Salesforce. Find out more: https://teampcn.com/ --- Disclaimer: Views expressed are those of The Payments Shed Podcast hosts and guests, not their respective employers. Nothing discussed constitutes investment, legal, tax or financial advice.

In the latest episode of The Payments Shed Podcast, filmed live from our London studio, Grant Evans and Liam Gray are joined by Dr. Omer Dawelbeit, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, and Victor Mithouard, Senior Director of Payments at Mambu, for a conversation exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming payment decisioning, reducing fraud and enabling financial institutions to move from reactive processing towards proactive, personalised financial experiences. Omer and Victor bring perspectives from cloud infrastructure and core banking technology to explore how AI is becoming the decision engine behind modern payments. From real-time transaction monitoring to predictive analytics and automated decisioning, they discuss how banks, fintechs and payment providers can use machine learning to make faster, more intelligent decisions. The conversation begins with the challenge of balancing fraud prevention and customer experience. While AI can identify suspicious transactions in milliseconds, overly aggressive fraud controls can also block legitimate customers and damage merchant conversion. Grant, Liam, Omer and Victor examine the trade-offs between false positives, fraud losses and decisioning latency, and why getting that balance right is becoming increasingly important. A major focus is the data foundations required to make AI-driven payments work. How much transaction history does an institution actually need to build reliable models? Can smaller fintechs compete with established banks that have decades of customer data? They explore data quality, synthetic datasets, shared intelligence and the infrastructure needed to turn raw information into meaningful decisions. The discussion then shifts to hyper-personalisation, privacy and customer trust. From adaptive credit limits and tailored financial products to dynamic pricing, AI creates opportunities for more relevant customer experiences. But where does personalisation become intrusive? They examine the implications of GDPR, PSD2 and PSD3, alongside the importance of transparency and responsible data usage. Grant, Liam, Omer and Victor also explore what proactive payment decisioning looks like in practice. From predicting failed payments before they happen to adjusting credit limits based on customer behaviour, they discuss how financial institutions could move beyond responding to transactions and begin anticipating customer needs. They also consider what happens when predictive models get things wrong. Plus, Omer and Victor take on The Payments Shed's legendary Shelf of Shame, challenging an industry habit or misconception surrounding payments and AI that deserves to disappear. *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Cyclops. Cyclops helps payments companies offer crypto acceptance, stablecoin settlement and payouts through one unified infrastructure platform. Find out more: https://cyclops.finance/ *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Salesloft. Salesloft uses agentic AI to turn buyer, conversation, deal and forecast data into clear actions that help revenue teams sell smarter. Find out more: https://www.salesloft.com *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Mastercard Open Finance. Mastercard Open Finance enables businesses to use consumer-permissioned financial data to create more connected and personalised financial experiences. Find out more: https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/open-finance.html *** The Payments Shed Podcast is partnered with PCN. PCN is a global boutique recruitment agency connecting leading talent and businesses across fintech, cybersecurity, SaaS, e-commerce and Salesforce. Find out more: https://teampcn.com/ *** Disclaimer: Views expressed are those of The Payments Shed Podcast hosts and guests, not their respective employers. Nothing discussed constitutes investment, legal, tax or financial advice.

Checkout.com powers payments for some of the world's best-known brands, and most of the people paying will never know its name. That's the point.In this episode of The Payments Shed, Justin Hanna chats with Rory O'Neill, Chief Marketing Officer at Checkout.com live from Money 20/20 USA 2026, to talk about the thinking behind putting an "invisible" product in some of the world's most visible advertising spots. Rory explains why the best payment experiences go unnoticed, why most B2B advertising tries to say too much, and why Checkout's campaign starts with the shopper rather than the feature list. They also get into the community of payment geeks obsessed with acceptance rates, transaction costs and checkout experience, what builds and breaks consumer trust, and what "invisible" means when AI agents start doing the shopping. Plus, Rory puts one thing on the Shelf of Shame. *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Cyclops. Cyclops helps payments companies offer crypto acceptance, stablecoin settlement and payouts through one unified infrastructure platform. Find out more: ⁠https://cyclops.finance/⁠ The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Salesloft. Salesloft uses agentic AI to turn buyer, conversation, deal and forecast data into clear actions that help revenue teams sell smarter. Find out more: ⁠https://www.salesloft.com⁠ The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Mastercard Open Finance. Mastercard Open Finance enables businesses to use consumer-permissioned financial data to create more connected and personalised financial experiences. Find out more: ⁠https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/open-finance.html⁠ The Payments Shed Podcast is partnered with PCN. PCN is a global boutique recruitment agency connecting leading talent and businesses across fintech, cybersecurity, SaaS, e-commerce and Salesforce. Find out more: ⁠https://teampcn.com/⁠ Disclaimer: Views expressed are those of The Payments Shed Podcast hosts and guests, not their respective employers. Nothing discussed constitutes investment, legal, tax or financial advice.

Modern Treasury likes to build in-house, but card data changes the maths. On the floor at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas, Sarah Stapp sits down with Matt Craig (Product, Modern Treasury) and Shane Curran (Founder & CEO, Evervault) to talk about owning more of the stack.Matt explains why Modern Treasury has applied for a national trust bank charter and why building in-house is the default. He also tells the story of launching Push2Card with Evervault without taking on full PCI scope. Shane explains how Evervault lets teams build their own card tooling, and what enterprise support looks like in practice. Plus: the Shelf of Shame for how money movers handle card data.🎙️ Host: Sarah Stapp, Co-Host, The Payments Shed👤 Guests: Matt Craig, Product, Modern Treasury | Shane Curran, Founder & CEO, Evervault📍 Recorded live at Money20/20 USA 2026, The Venetian, Las Vegas#Payments #Money2020 #Evervault #ModernTreasury #PCI #Fintech

In the latest episode of The Payments Shed Podcast, filmed live from our London studio, Liam Gray and Justin Hanna are joined by Lena Hackeloer, Founder and CEO of Brite Payments, for a conversation exploring the future of checkout, the rise of account-to-account (A2A) payments, European payments sovereignty and what it takes to build and scale a successful fintech. Lena takes us inside the changing landscape of European payments, drawing on her experience at Klarna, Qliro and Brite to explore how consumer expectations and payment technology are evolving. From instant bank payments to embedded finance and agentic commerce, they discuss what the checkout of the future could look like and whether A2A payments could eventually challenge cards as the default way to pay. The conversation turns to the maturation of A2A payments and the prospect of industry consolidation. With more providers competing for market share, Liam, Justin and Lena examine what separates sustainable businesses from those that may struggle to survive. They also explore the challenges surrounding recurring payments, the growing involvement of card networks in Pay by Bank and the importance of building consumer trust. A major focus is the commercial case for merchants and consumers. Beyond lower processing costs, A2A payments offer potential advantages around settlement speed, fraud prevention, chargeback exposure and transaction data. But convincing consumers to change established payment habits remains a challenge. They discuss where A2A delivers genuine value and which markets and use cases are best positioned for adoption. The discussion then shifts to European payments sovereignty and the continent's reliance on international card networks. With geopolitical uncertainty driving renewed interest in domestic payment infrastructure, they explore the significance of SEPA Instant, the ambitions of Wero and the European Payments Initiative, and what it would take to build a genuinely competitive European payments alternative. Lena also shares the lessons from founding and scaling Brite Payments, including international expansion, entering Germany, securing $60 million in funding and building trust with banks, regulators and merchants. They explore the realities of fintech leadership, what investors look for in a growing payments business and how her earlier experiences have shaped Brite's development. Plus, Lena takes on The Payments Shed's legendary Shelf of Shame, challenging an industry habit, assumption or piece of jargon that deserves to disappear. *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Cyclops. Cyclops helps payments companies offer crypto acceptance, stablecoin settlement and payouts through one unified infrastructure platform. Find out more: https://cyclops.finance/ *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Salesloft. Salesloft uses agentic AI to turn buyer, conversation, deal and forecast data into clear actions that help revenue teams sell smarter. Find out more: https://www.salesloft.com *** The Payments Shed Podcast is sponsored by Mastercard Open Finance. Mastercard Open Finance enables businesses to use consumer-permissioned financial data to create more connected and personalised financial experiences. Find out more: https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/open-finance.html *** The Payments Shed Podcast is partnered with PCN. PCN is a global boutique recruitment agency connecting leading talent and businesses across fintech, cybersecurity, SaaS, e-commerce and Salesforce. Find out more: https://teampcn.com/ *** Disclaimer: Views expressed are those of The Payments Shed Podcast hosts and guests, not their respective employers. Nothing discussed constitutes investment, legal, tax or financial advice.