By Pete Donat, Managing Partner, Commerce Tech Partners
Another Money20/20 in the books. Four days in Vegas, 11,000 people, 600+ speakers, and an impressive number of booths promising AI will fix payments. (It won't. Not by itself.)
The recaps are rolling in now, and most say the same thing: agentic commerce is the story, stablecoins are the sequel. Fine. True, even. But they're written for investors and bankers. I sat through a lot of those sessions thinking about the people who actually write the checks... merchants, and the software platforms that serve them.
Here's what I took home.
Agentic is everywhere. The business model? Still loading.
Every other session was about AI agents that shop and pay for you. Ask the obvious follow-up and the room got quiet.
Who's paying for the agent? Who gets paid? How does everyone in the chain (agent, merchant, processor, network) get compensated? And when the agent buys the wrong thing... who eats it?
Nobody had a clean answer. Commerce Ventures said it pretty plainly in their own recap: everyone's thinking about it, nobody knows exactly how it will work. Visa has a protocol. So does Mastercard. So do Google, OpenAI and Stripe. They overlap. There's no rulebook. Yet.
Merchants aren't waiting around, though. BCG surveyed nearly 500 large merchants for its 2026 Global Payments Report, and 73% said they'd switch acquirers to get better help with agent-initiated transactions. Seventy-three percent. That's not curiosity. That's a buying signal.
My take: don't bet the roadmap on any one protocol. Do the boring stuff now. Clean product data. Tokenized cards on file. A clear record of what the customer actually said yes to. Whoever wins, every agent is going to need all three.
The underappreciated part: the consumer's bot
Almost all the talk was about merchants selling TO agents. Very little about consumers sending agents AFTER merchants.
Start with subscriptions. Your retention flow was built for a human who feels a little guilty about canceling. The agent feels nothing. It will find the promo code, ask for the save discount, take it... and cancel next month anyway if something better shows up.
Then there's the card. The agent picks which one pays. Maybe it optimizes for the consumer's rewards. Maybe it lands on the card that costs you the most to accept. Nobody asked you.
And no, this isn't a 2030 problem. Cloudflare data from June showed about 57% of internet traffic is already bots, not people.
One more wrinkle from Commerce Ventures I liked: as agents do more of the work, they turn into big buyers themselves (compute, data, research). Somebody has to approve and police that spend. Fun.
My take: your checkout and your save offers are about to be read by a machine that doesn't care about your brand. Figure out which offers you'd happily hand to every bot that asks. Then figure out which ones you wouldn't.
Follow the money
The quieter story in Vegas, and frankly the more interesting one, was the incentives sloshing around the system. Somebody's winning. Somebody's paying for it. A few I'm watching...
Visa's Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP). The Level 2 discount on commercial cards is gone. Want the lower rate? Send complete Level 3 data, and Visa's AI will grade your homework. Your data quality is becoming your rate.
PIN debit. For years it's been the "cheap" way to take debit. In recent client work, we found certain PIN networks charging several times what other debit networks charge on the same transaction, once the network fees are added in. Cheap compared to what, exactly? Check. Don't assume.
Surcharging. The Visa/Mastercard merchant settlement got preliminary court approval in June. It would expand surcharging rights and let merchants turn away some premium rewards cards. Between final approval and the appeals that are almost certainly coming, the timing is anyone's guess.
Zoom out and BCG has payments revenue growth slowing from about 7% a year to about 5% through 2030. Slower growth usually means more pressure on fees... and more creative ways to collect them.
My take: the fee lines nobody has read in five years are exactly where the money is moving. Somebody is getting paid on your routing decisions. Make sure it's not only them.
Where I'd start (no moonshot required)
Simple. Read the statement.
Pull the last three months of processing statements. Find the network fees, not just interchange. They tend to hide in plain sight.
Ask how your debit transactions get routed. Then ask why.
Walk through your recurring billing and save offers as if a bot were on the other end. Where does it break?
If any of this sounds familiar, let's compare notes. Twenty minutes is usually enough to tell whether there's money sitting on the table.
