We built payment systems for humans—accounts, cards, and checkout flows designed around people clicking "buy." But AI agents don't shop that way. As autonomous systems begin to transact, negotiate, and settle at machine speed, they expose how much of our economic infrastructure simply wasn't built for them. Payments are just the surface; identity, trust, contracts, and settlement all need reinventing. Learn what economic infrastructure AI agents actually require beyond payment rails, how identity and trust must evolve when machines transact autonomously, and who is building the foundational layers of the agentic economy.

For years, payments competed on the rails—faster, cheaper, more reliable ways to move money from A to B. But as transactions become instant, ubiquitous, and nearly free, the rails themselves are commoditizing. The value is migrating elsewhere: to data, embedded experiences, working capital, fraud intelligence, and the software wrapped around every transaction. Moving money is table stakes; the real margin lives above it. Learn where payments value is genuinely being created as core processing commoditizes, how leading players monetize data, software, and embedded finance beyond the transaction, and what it takes to climb the value stack.

As AI in finance shifts from advising to acting, institutions face a speed–trust paradox. Using MAS' Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) framework as a lens, this discussion explores why the data moat must evolve from volume to an operational foundation that carries trusted identity, mandate, disposition and audit data across agents, workflows and jurisdictions.