Payments have become faster and easier, but the journey to make a payment is not always seamless. Online payment journeys can still involve multiple steps, from moving between apps to saving and uploading QR codes. As part of PayNow Gen2, new capabilities such as deep-linking are being explored to reduce these frictions by creating a more direct path from checkout to payment.

The next frontier could go further still. Advances in AI are opening up the possibility of agents that can search, select and transact on behalf of users. This shifts the payment experience from reducing the steps a user takes to reducing the need for users to initiate individual payments at all. This will require not only new approaches to authorisation, control and accountability, but also infrastructure capable of supporting new forms of automated payment activity, including the proposed FAST-Lite micropayments rail.

This session traces that evolution from making today's payment journeys more seamless to preparing for a future in which payments may increasingly be autonomous. It asks how the industry can continue reducing friction while preserving the control, accountability and trust that consumers and merchants expect from the payment system.