For decades, payment systems have been designed around human behaviour. AI agents play by different rules. Unlike humans, agents do not care about rewards, interfaces or brand loyalty. They optimise for speed, cost, and reliability.

As agents begin making payments on behalf of users and businesses, they may transact at a scale and frequency never seen before, paying for everything from AI services and digital content to machine-to-machine interactions. The result could be millions of low-value transactions that challenge the economics and design of today's payment infrastructure.

Are our payment rails ready for this future? As PayNow Gen2 considers capabilities relevant to agentic commerce, this session explores whether existing payment rails can adapt, what role programmable money could play, and how payment infrastructure must evolve when machines start choosing how to pay.

Agents that resolve conversations save you money. Agents that pursue outcomes make you money. This session covers how long-horizon agents work a job from start to finish over days or weeks, and what it takes to trust them with revenue-critical work like originating loans or onboarding customers.

Interoperability is widely recognised as a goal, but connecting one country’s payment system to another takes more than technology. It requires alignment on regulation, standards, governance and commercial incentives — as well as negotiation over how costs, risks and benefits are shared. This panel brings together the networks, national payment schemes, policymakers and multilateral hubs working to make cross-border payments more connected, examining where regulatory and commercial frictions persist, how different payment ecosystems can connect and scale across markets, and what smaller or newer markets need to participate on viable terms.

The discussion will explore where cross-border payment cooperation is working in practice, what it takes to make connections sustainable, and whether the biggest barriers to greater connectivity are technical, regulatory or commercial.