The Payment Stack Was Not Built for AI - Philip Bruno (CSGO, ACI Worldwide)

AI agents are beginning to shop, negotiate and make payments on behalf of consumers and businesses. But most payment infrastructure, compliance rules and liability frameworks were designed for humans.

In this episode of the WRAP UP Podcast, I sit down with Philip Bruno, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at ACI Worldwide, to explore how the payments industry must adapt to the emerging machine economy.

We discuss why merchants may need to stop blocking bots and start distinguishing trusted customer agents from malicious ones. Philip explains why businesses should remain independent of any single agentic commerce protocol and how payment orchestration could help them support new protocols, rails and payment methods without losing control of their customer relationships.

We also examine one of the biggest unanswered questions in agentic commerce: who is liable when an AI agent makes a mistake? Philip shares his view on how today’s payment rules are being applied to agent-led transactions and why new commercial and regulatory frameworks will be needed.

The conversation then turns to what Philip calls the “three-horse race” between stablecoins, tokenised bank deposits and instant payments. We break down where each option could succeed, why instant payments may eventually overtake debit cards globally, and how stablecoins could become especially important for cross-border payments and markets with unstable currencies.

Philip also explains ACI Worldwide’s approach to intelligent payment orchestration, including technology that can identify transactions likely to fail, recommend repairs and reduce the time required to fix a wire payment from around 40 minutes to two minutes.

We also discuss:

• Why B2B agentic commerce could become much larger than consumer agentic commerce
• How AI agents could transform procurement and automate bidding between businesses
• Whether AI companies require a new payments and usage-based billing stack
• How merchants can decide which payment methods and protocols to support
• Why payment orchestration must remain independent of individual processors and rails
• How banks are preparing for instant payments, stablecoins and tokenised deposits
• What the growth of local instant payment systems means for cards and cash
• Why experimentation may be the only viable strategy as payments continue to fragment
• ACI Worldwide’s first US customer for its Kinetic cloud-native payments platform

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