AI in payments, beyond the hype

Arthur Bedel

Founder

Monyz

In this season of The Shot, we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping payments, well beyond the buzz around agentic commerce.

Our guest is Arthur Bedel, Founder of Monyz, the accelerator for fintechs, and strategic advisor to the companies redefining how financial institutions and payment companies operate. Arthur sees two disruptive forces at work in the industry: AI, and stablecoins with digital wallets (the second one is the topic of Season 6 with Jordan Lawrence). This season focuses on AI, and on what it changes for the way transactions are made, authenticated and accepted.

Episode highlights

EP.01 | AI in payments: the two shifts that matter

AI in payments is not just agentic commerce. In this first episode, Arthur Bedel, founder of Monyz, names the two forces disrupting the industry: AI, and stablecoins with digital wallets. On the AI side, he sees two shifts: agentic commerce, for humans and for agents, and intelligence applied to the processes payment teams already run. His starting point: a payment is a data stream moving money from one ledger to another. How it moves keeps changing, but getting a transaction accepted is still largely manual, and that is where AI has the most work to do.

EP.02 | Agentic commerce: when an AI agent pays

An AI agent books a trip to Roatán: flight, hotel, payment, without a human clicking pay. So how do you prove the payment is what the human actually wanted? Arthur Bedel explains how agentic commerce changes the rules behind a transaction. Authentication built for humans, like 3DS, no longer fits, so more context has to travel with every payment to show that an agent made the purchase but a human made the decision. For Arthur, it is the first time in ages that card networks and financial players are redefining commerce as we know it.

EP.03 | Agent-to-agent payments run on blockchain

What happens when AI agents pay each other? Most transactions today run on cards, but card rails are too slow and too expensive for what an agent needs. Arthur Bedel explains why blockchain is becoming the key rail for agent-to-agent payments: speed, smart contracts that execute as soon as a condition is met, and low transaction costs. Agents will not transact like humans. They will buy API access and data in what Arthur calls nano transactions, and the infrastructure behind payments will have to be rebuilt, for agents and for humans alike.

EP.04 | AI agents that fix payment acceptance

Why do good transactions still get declined? Arthur Bedel explains that most of the AI in payments today is still manual: hand-built decision trees that are never fully mapped, decline codes that say too little, and blind retries inside a black box. What comes next is an agentic workforce, AI agents that work like team members and whose whole job is to improve acceptance, reduce fraud, manage chargebacks and optimize checkout in real time, personalized for each transaction. For PSPs and their merchants, acceptance logic stops being hard-coded and starts learning.

Why it matters for payment operators

For PSPs, PayFacs, ISOs and ISVs, both shifts land in the infrastructure: more transaction context to carry, new rails to connect, and acceptance logic that learns instead of being hard-coded. That is what your merchants will expect you to handle for them.

Go further with AI vs fraud: what it changes for PSPs and PayFacs, how AI recovers declined payments and the challenge of payment routing.

Go further on the blog

Read the article that extends this season

Watch Episode 1

Contents

AI in payments, beyond the hype

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