PSE Consulting Conference to Examine AI Commerce and Payment Risk

What changed

PSE Consulting’s Merchant Acquiring Conference returns to London on 17 November, marking 15 years of payments-industry gatherings. Senior representatives from Adyen, Revolut, Airwallex, Checkout.com, EPI/Wero, Tide and Vinted Pay UK will discuss AI, embedded finance, marketplaces, fraud, regulation and resilience.

PSE will also present research covering 4,250 AI-active shoppers across the UK, US, Germany and France. Its findings include that 74% prefer an independent AI assistant to one built into a single retailer, while 93% expect to use retail marketplaces as much as, or more than, they do today.

Why it matters

The useful takeaway is that AI shopping has a payment problem hiding behind its glamour.

An assistant may help someone compare products or answer complicated questions. But the actual purchase often still happens somewhere else. That leaves merchants, marketplaces, payment providers and card networks responsible for turning an AI recommendation into a trusted transaction.

That handoff matters because whoever completes the sale carries more of the risk. PSE Managing Director Chris Jones said platforms that tried to close the gap themselves, including Meta, had to take on substantially more transaction risk. Scaling agentic commerce will therefore require payment standards that keep checkout simple without concentrating liability in one intermediary.

The same shift is already visible in software for smaller businesses. PSE says 23% of UK small and medium-sized businesses now use embedded payments from a SaaS platform, up from 11% in 2024. The share offered such a service has also risen to 46%, from 22% two years ago.

That changes the strategic question for software companies. Payments are no longer just an add-on beside the core product. They are becoming part of how a platform holds the customer relationship and completes the business workflow.

Whether AI reaches large-scale use at the point of purchase remains uncertain. The conference’s sharper question is who will absorb the fraud, compliance and operational burden when it does.