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PSE Consulting will hold its Merchant Acquiring Conference in London, marking 15 years of bringing together senior payments executives.
Speakers will include representatives from Adyen, Revolut, ACI Worldwide, Airwallex, Checkout.com, EPI/Wero, Forter, Tide, TrueLayer and Vinted Pay UK, among others, as the payments sector examines changes in merchant acquiring.
The agenda focuses on themes rising up the industry's list of priorities, including agentic commerce, embedded finance, marketplaces, AI-led fraud management, resilience, payment orchestration, the convergence of credit and acquiring, and regulatory change through PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation.
The conference comes as AI starts to influence how consumers search for products and services, although it remains less established at the point of purchase. That gap has become a key issue in payments because the party completing a transaction often carries the operational and fraud burden.
Research cited by the consultancy points to a changing consumer journey. In a survey of 4,250 AI-active shoppers across the UK, US, Germany and France, 74% said they preferred an independent AI assistant over one tied to a single retailer.
The same research found that 93% expect to use retail marketplaces as much as, or more than, they do now. That suggests marketplaces will remain central to completed transactions even as AI tools play a bigger role in product discovery.
Embedded payments
Separate figures from PSE indicate that software platforms are also taking a larger role in payments relationships with small and medium-sized businesses. Its research found that 23% of UK SMBs now use an embedded payments service from one of their SaaS platforms, up from 11% in 2024.
PSE also found that 46% of UK SMBs have been offered an embedded payments service by a software platform, compared with 22% two years earlier. The shift adds to pressure on traditional acquirers and payment service providers as distribution moves closer to software providers and platforms.
The event has run since 2011 and has featured more than 160 speakers and attracted more than 2,000 attendees from over 650 payments companies, according to PSE. Earlier editions focused on themes such as open banking and payment orchestration, both of which later became mainstream subjects across the sector.
This year's programme reflects a market in which the structure of commerce is shifting again. Marketplaces are taking on broader payment responsibilities, embedded finance continues to spread through software platforms, and AI is creating new fraud challenges, including synthetic identity fraud and more automated forms of attack.
Those trends have implications across the payments chain. Merchants, acquirers, schemes and fintech groups are all grappling with how to manage risk, maintain transaction flows and determine which participant owns the customer relationship.
Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting, said the industry needed to focus on the practical limits of current AI shopping models as well as the excitement around them.
"There's a lot of excitement about agentic commerce, and rightly so, but we need to be realistic about where we are. Today the agent is rarely present at the point of purchase. Consumers ask an AI the complicated questions, then go elsewhere to complete the purchase. Where platforms such as Meta have tried to close that gap themselves, they have had to take on much more of the transaction risk, and that model is difficult to scale. Getting agentic commerce to work at scale is a payments problem as much as an AI one. It needs standards that give consumers a low-friction experience without loading intermediaries with risk. That's a conversation for acquirers, PSPs, schemes and merchants together, and it's exactly the one we want to have in the room on 17 November."
The speaker list underlines how broadly the issue now cuts across the market, from global payment processors and merchant acquirers to fraud specialists, digital banks and platform-led businesses. For companies involved in acquiring, the discussion is no longer limited to card acceptance and settlement. It now extends to who controls checkout, how risk is allocated and where new payment relationships begin.
PSE's survey findings suggest that while AI may influence the top of the shopping funnel, merchants and marketplaces still play a decisive role when a purchase is completed. At the same time, the rise of embedded payments shows that software platforms are becoming a more important route into payments services for businesses.
Against that backdrop, the conference agenda points to a sector trying to work out how commerce, fraud management and regulation will evolve together as payment flows move across a wider set of intermediaries.