MPE 2026: Polymath Consulting on Agentic AI’s Multi-Front Challenge in Payments

At MPE 2026, David Parker, CEO and founder of Polymath Consulting, shared his insights into the evolving landscape of card and payment technology.

Having been a pioneer in the e-money space, Parker now contributes his expertise across various boards, including Paynetics and KYP, and chairs the International Loyalty Awards. During the conversation, he addressed the growing complexity of “Agentic AI”, AI agents capable of making autonomous commercial decisions and transactions on behalf of users.

Parker argues that the path to widespread AI adoption isn’t just a single “bottleneck” but a series of interconnected technical and structural challenges. One primary hurdle is the lack of standardized protocols for non-human commerce. For instance, how would an autonomous agent using one protocol interact with local payment systems like PIX in Brazil? Parker suggests that we may soon require orchestration for Agentic commerce to manage the various protocols that agents will inevitably use.

Beyond technical compatibility, Polymath Consulting highlighted critical issues regarding trust and regulation and the payments industry must determine how to handle chargebacks for unauthorized agent purchases and how to adapt authentication methods like 3DS when a user isn’t personally present for the transaction.

Furthermore, current website infrastructures and fraud detection systems are designed for human behavior; as an AI agent scanning a site for products in milliseconds can easily be mistaken for a bot or a fraudster. Polymath Consulting noted that even advanced tools like ChatGPT currently struggle with live data like flight times, indicating that merchant websites are not yet fully searchable by AI.

Despite these challenges, Parker is optimistic about a “crawl, walk, run” approach and envisions a future where “safe lists” of merchants are established, similar to how Amazon currently operates, allowing agents to handle routine tasks like reordering milk without constant manual reconfirmation. By participating in forums like MPE, Parker aims to better understand merchant concerns and timelines, ensuring that the innovators and startups he supports can navigate these emerging path ways effectively.

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