For decades, payment systems have been designed around human behaviour. AI agents could upend those assumptions. Unlike humans, agents do not care about rewards, interfaces or brand loyalty. They optimise for speed, cost, reliability and programmability. As agents begin making payments on behalf of users and businesses, they may transact at a scale and frequency never seen before — and they will do so without the friction, loyalty, and psychology that payment systems have long relied upon to manage risk and drive behaviour.
 
This raises three questions. Can machines be trusted to make payments using our rails — and who is accountable when something goes wrong? Can agents genuinely serve users and merchants better than today's systems, or do they simply add a layer of opacity between people and their money? And what does the next generation of payment infrastructure need to look like to make agentic commerce safe, inclusive, and scalable? As PayNow Generation 2 considers capabilities relevant to agentic commerce, this session tackles all three.

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.