While most payments conversations focus on consumer rails, the real bottleneck may be commercial: B2B and merchant payments across Asia, the Middle East and Africa remain fragmented and cash-heavy. This panel unpacks what it takes to build commercial payment corridors that actually work and where the friction still lies.

Fraudsters didn't wait for a governance framework. Autonomous agents are already probing payment rails, spinning up synthetic identities and running social-engineering scripts at machine speed, while many institutions still triage alerts in batches. With instant payments and agentic commerce scaling fast, the window between attack and response is now measured in milliseconds. The panel looks at where real-time controls are keeping pace and where they are structurally behind. It also covers how to tell a legitimate customer's agent from a malicious one, and what defending with agents looks like when regulators still expect a human in the loop.

The protocol race is over faster than anyone expected. Visa, Google, Mastercard, OpenAI, Stripe and Ant International have all shipped agent-initiated payment infrastructure, while countries such as Korea alone recorded over 100 million AI-to-AI payments in seven months. This discussion will be around where machine will transact first, at what granularity, and on whose stack.

That question does not have a global answer, because agentic commerce is gated by four preconditions that are unevenly distributed or agreed upon.

Identity: can an agent be issued a provable, scoped, revocable mandate.

Acceptance density: is there enough merchant coverage for an agent's choice to be meaningful.

Settlement granularity: can value move at machine speed and sub-cent size.

Customer trust and value: will people actually delegate? Does the result make everyday finance simpler, more transparent and more accessible, including for customers that conventional banking has overlooked?

The first three are being solved on the rails; the fourth is decided in the customer relationship. This panel puts both views on one stage: the platforms building agentic infrastructure, and a digital bank that rebuilt banking around customer needs. Together they map the next eighteen months by looking look at where AI creates practical customer value first and how institutions should balance automation with human judgment and accountability.