Payment Expert’s Callum Williams has been on the ground at Merchant Payment Ecosystem (MPE) in Berlin. Read all the developments, key talking points, and industry views from day one.
Day one of the 2026 Merchant Payment Ecosystem (MPE) conference opened with Chair Ruth Wandhöfer listing the multiple opportunities, innovations and challenges facing merchants in an increasingly diverse payment landscape.
She noted emerging technologies, digital currencies and evolutions in fraud methods would feature heavily during the conference agenda. As would – perhaps unsurprisingly – AI, particularly agentic AI which was the topic of conversation for one of the morning’s panels.
A number of online market places have jumped on the agentic commerce trend in the last 12 months, partnering with the likes of Google, Stripe, Open AI and TrueLayer. But experts believe current innovations in this area are only just scratching the surface of what is possible.
Brice van de Walle, Executive VP of Core Payments at Mastercard Europe, believes “AI is the topic that everyone will be talking about,” but warned it may take time before both merchants and payment providers realise its potential.
“We need to be patient, but the ingredients are already there for success: consumer demand, going to AI instead of Google searches,” said van de Walle. “The standards are also there, you need standards to build global interoperability.”
Anurag Chitlangia, Product Lead-Alternative Payments at Uber, shares how the company has taken note of the rise of Agentic AI, which ultimately reaffirms its brand identity as a trusted service provider and how leveraging its own data points can secure consumer confidence beyond picking and dropping them off.
“As a user-friendly focused company, we want to be where our customers are,” said Chitlangia. “If a customer trusts or does not trust AI agents, we have to be ready for the future. Five years from today, we might not have a checkout page, as agents can confirm the transaction. We are far from there and there are challenges that need solving.
“Uber stands for trust and safety, because the user sees the Uber logo and understands that, but the agent is building a decision upon APIs and data. A global business like Uber has the edge as we have the data points to help with pickup and dropoff points, that’s the difference between an agentic and data business world.”
Payment costs are growing
Europe typically sets the standard when it comes to regulating emerging technologies, such as enforcing the EU AI Act in August 2024, which mandates companies leveraging AI models to assess the risk levels and ensure human oversight remains at the heart of the operation.
But the standards outside of Europe become a lot blurred for merchants aiming for international scalability, which is why payabl. Group CEO, Ugne Buraciene, believes the complexities of performing day-to-day transactions in new markets remains a challenge for merchants.
“It is very fragmented and complex, and more difficult for merchants to operate globally,” she said. “(I) see the industry going to help and assist in the complexity of the day to day transactions for merchants, making sure the cashflow runs fine and operates seamlessly anywhere you like.”
Juan Garrido, Head of Global Banking Merchant Solutions at Bank of America, followed on from Buraciene’s complexity challenges, believing the cost of payments continues to be a challenge for merchants, as well as highlighting the multiple payment methods needed in the checkout to ensure customer satisfaction.
“Number one continues to be the cost of payments, grown increasingly across the merchant discount rate, chargebacks, cost of operation, tokenisation, etc.,” said Garrido.
“The regulatory landscape continues to be at the top of mind, as merchants want to be a one stop shop for global markets. Digital wallets, local and alternative payment methods are needed to ensure that most customers have a frictionless and fraud free process. Cross-border also has a lot of complexities. It is costly, timely to receive settlement, so there is a real opportunity there.”
Payments are not complicated, they’re complex
Later on in the day, Matteo Gamba, an industry expert, also admitted that “merchant payments are often described as complicated” when in actual fact “they are mostly complex”.
Startups will more often than not have to contend with the complexity of which payment methods to offer, asking questions such as: how popular is this payment method? Is it secure? What are the most popular payment methods in a specific market? “Yes, payments are inherently complex, and that is not going away, but they do not have to be complicated,” said Fabian Muessig, Head of Solutions Engineering, EMEA, at Shopify.
There also continues to be complexity issues when businesses and merchants launch in new markets, often without the requisite knowledge of the payment landscape. Understanding the regulatory environment, and also recognising who the incumbents are is a vital component of any company launching their services in a country for the first time.
If a merchant is unable to support Pix in Brazil, or WeChat Pay in China, consumers will not be interested. Juan Vicente Carda, Business Development Manager at dLocal, emphasised this but reassured complexity is more of a good problem to have as opposed to complications.
“Many merchants get complications when bridging different markets,” said Carda. “Complexity is good in a sense, complications are not and we have to reduce that.”
The crux for many merchants’ complexity issue lies in their business model. Volodymyr Sytnikov, CEO and Co-Founder of Brainstack, pointed out that merchant payments is “more complex in its solutions”, but what are these solutions?
Adam Davies, Director of Agentic Commerce at Forter, looked towards data and how businesses can leverage both consumer and payment data to tailor their business model to the consumer needs.
“Where does the complexity lie? It is collecting the data and signals to come up with a solution designed to your business model,” said Davies.
Agentic commerce is possibly the next step for a burgeoning business seeking for high-growth across multiple markets. But it is how this is leveraged which ultimately depends on if a business’ model is prepared for the impending agentic wave.
Optimising agentic payment orchestration
Speaking on agentic commerce, Mark Ronayne, Associate International Director at Juspay, outlined why the technology is set to reshape payment orchestration. Ronayne warned that merchants who fail to adapt risk falling behind, as agentic commerce introduces new ways for customers to shop and transact.
“Keeping up with all these innovations is tasking,” said Ronayne. “Customer habits are changing, merchants who adapt quickly stand to succeed the most. Orchestration needs to adapt.”
At the centre of this shift is the growing role of AI in orchestration models. Ronayne pointed to Juspay’s Payments OS as an example, bringing together modularity, authentication analytics and a unified payment schema within a single system.
“It all starts at your front door, the checkout,” continued Ronayne. “Things like pre-filling forms, offering one-click checkouts, etc., the goal is to increase the authorisation rate and reduce drop-off.
“Your operating channel needs to be omnichannel ready. Be it online, via an app, or new agentic protocols, the channels should now no longer matter to your backend, as it does not to your customers.”
Ronayne added that authentication analytics is becoming critical, enabling merchants to understand the true cost of each transaction and establish a single source of truth across an increasingly fragmented payments landscape.
By observing and comparing performance across payment methods through a unified schema, merchants can automate audits and gain clearer visibility into the full cost lifecycle of a transaction.
Stablecoins are nothing new
While stablecoins are often framed as a new frontier, David Birch, Global Ambassador at Consult Hyperion, argued many of today’s debates echo those of the past. Drawing comparisons to historical discussions around currency in the UK, Birch suggested the industry is revisiting familiar questions, this time in a digital context shaped by technologies such as USDT and the proposed digital euro.
“The money of the old economy will not work in the new economy, it’s not optimal because it’s built using the technology of the old economy,” said Birch.
“Stablecoins are creating rails for a new kind of digital asset, the stablecoins themselves don’t really matter, in the long run, the institutions they created did, we will see the same thing.”
Birch pointed to ongoing debates – ranging from whether stablecoin deposits should bear interest in the US, to questions around the role and design of a digital euro in Europe – as evidence that the industry is still defining the purpose of these instruments.
He argued that while the themes may repeat, the outcomes will differ, shaped by more advanced technology and broader use cases that will ultimately redefine both the language and infrastructure of money.
Stay tuned for more developments in merchant payments, emerging technologies and digital currencies during Payment Expert’s coverage of MPE Day Two.
