Latest / The Payments Shed / Ep. 8 - The Rise of Agentic Commerce: How Worldpay Is Powering the Future of AI-Driven Payments with Cindy Turner, CPO @ Money 20/20 USA 2025

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Ep. 8 - The Rise of Agentic Commerce: How Worldpay Is Powering the Future of AI-Driven Payments with Cindy Turner, CPO @ Money 20/20 USA 2025 · The Payments Shed

• 0:08
  So welcome back to the Payment Show podcast.
• 0:10
  Today we have Cindy Turner, CPA from Worldpay.
• 0:13
  Cindy, thank you so much for joining us.
• 0:14
  Thank you. Give us an introduction on
• 0:16
  yourself. Tell you great.
• 0:17
  Well, thank you Justin, I really appreciate it.
• 0:19
  I enjoy these and it's nice to drop something like this into a
• 0:22
  busy day. Monday 2020.
• 0:25
  I have been with Worldpay for about a year and a half.
• 0:28
  I joined last April. My fun fact would be my one year
• 0:32
  anniversary was actually the day that the global acquisition was
• 0:35
  announced. So it was a wild first year and
• 0:38
  but I've been in the merchant side of payments for a really
• 0:40
  long time. So I got into it kind of
• 0:42
  accidentally. I was at KKR when we bought
• 0:44
  First Data and that was where I found payments, found the value
• 0:48
  chain really interesting, the space really interesting.
• 0:51
  I spent a little bit of time at Visa, quite a long time at JP
• 0:54
  Morgan. I'm running products there.
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  And then right before this I had the opportunity to run Braintree
• 0:59
  for a couple of years, so I'm deeply a payments geek at this
• 1:03
  point. That's what we like to hear on
• 1:04
  this show. So look, Cindy, tell me a little
• 1:06
  bit more about your thoughts on agentic commerce.
• 1:09
  It's a buzzword in the industry right now, but people are really
• 1:12
  starting to bring this to life. What does that mean to you?
• 1:14
  Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, Agentic is a very
• 1:17
  wide umbrella, but but broadly I think about the, the entire
• 1:22
  trend is that the consumer themselves is moving their
• 1:25
  moment of discovery into an LLM. And then the ability for agent
• 1:31
  operators, whether that's the LLM themselves or third party
• 1:34
  startups that are building within those environments to be
• 1:37
  able to create shopping that is a friction free, you know,
• 1:41
  beautiful consumer experience of how about I go buy that thing
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  for you? So what's engaged in that?
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  You know, you need the the consumer to have stored a card
• 1:51
  in, you know, some kind of vault, and then you need to move
• 1:54
  that transaction through to the merchant.
• 1:57
  So there's a lot of ways that that can happen.
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  That can happen, you know, with an agent shopping guest check
• 2:03
  out, it can happen with, you know, and it's very simplest
• 2:06
  just a link getting pushed to the consumer within the, you
• 2:08
  know, the the ChatGPT type of interface or it can happen with
• 2:12
  storing that card and a software to software based transaction.
• 2:15
  So we're not there yet in terms of the software to software
• 2:19
  based. We have a lot of instances of
• 2:22
  either the marketplace model where we're seeing some kind of
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  agent operator is creating a marketplace of goods or this
• 2:29
  shopping gift checkout headless commerce.
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  So, but we're still early in the experiment.
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  I love the term headless commerce.
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  I think there's more and more businesses that are now
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  approaching that idea of we don't need to be sat at the
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  front of the consumer. Yep, but if needed to then we
• 2:42
  can and and what's well pays role within this ecosystem.
• 2:46
  Yeah, it's funny. So I think headless commerce is
• 2:48
  really scary to merchants. So, you know, merchants, the the
• 2:52
  reason that they're in business is because they believe they
• 2:54
  have brand loyalty and they believe that they're better at
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  presenting a selection of inventory to the consumer than
• 3:01
  any of their competitors. So, you know, this is a scary
• 3:05
  moment for for a retailer that operates typically in fairly
• 3:09
  thin margins. And if that moment of discovery,
• 3:12
  so the inventory management moved into the LLM and then they
• 3:16
  lose the ability to have a consumer on their website, They
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  can't cross sell, they can't build brand loyalty.
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  You know, they even lose some of the connectivity to be able to
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  market, you know, incremental transactions back to to the
• 3:28
  consumer or they have really bad, you know, long tail non
• 3:32
  happy path. So if you need to make a return
• 3:34
  and you know, perplexity bought your bought your sweater for
• 3:37
  you, then you know, Macy's doesn't even know the perplexity
• 3:41
  sold that sweater. So, you know, I think headless
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  commerce is actually quite a scary moment for for many
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  merchants, but. That's kind of we talk about
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  challenges there. What's the benefits do you think
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  to the merchants? Of course we have the seamless
• 3:52
  customer and consumer journey, but what else do you think can
• 3:55
  really benefit a customer a merchant are using?
• 3:58
  Yeah, I mean, if the consumer's eyeballs move away from Google
• 4:02
  as their discovery or away from going straight to the merchant
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  themselves in their app or in a native surface, then their
• 4:09
  revenue's at stake. So if they want to continue to
• 4:12
  sell, they have to move into that environment, but it's a
• 4:16
  major transition for where we are in commerce right now.
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  And I think the consumer mindset has changed significantly when
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  buying things in retail, right? They want to be able to order it
• 4:26
  today and it comes tomorrow. That Amazon Prime mindset right,
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  is kind of what everyone is now looking for when they're buying
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  things. Talk to me a bit more about the
• 4:35
  world playing open AI partnership.
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  Firstly, Congrats on that. It's huge.
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  And you tell us a little bit more about them.
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  What it? Means, I think The funny thing
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  in agentic is there's been 6 announcements in the last like 2
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  months, right? So we have AC2, we have ACP
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  visas is Vic Visa innovation construct.
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  I think so there are so many every every major player is
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  trying to release their own protocol of what they believe
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  they can land agentic as world pays take is a little bit
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  different. We're saying let us sit, you
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  know, representing the merchant and be able to bring the
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  merchants perspective into each of those relationships.
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  So whether it's Google, it's open AI, it's Visa, we're able
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  to sit and be a partner to to the merchants and the partner to
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  the LM and the platform that's trying to own the consumer to
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  help influence them. So make sure that they're
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  thinking about things like returns, how's the return of
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  this transactions going to work? How are we going to navigate the
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  liability? So if the agent makes a
• 5:36
  purchase, but it isn't exactly what the consumer would have
• 5:40
  bought, and sometimes the skew is the right thing, there's what
• 5:44
  the consumer would have bought. But you can think about in any
• 5:46
  industry in a travel transaction, like, yes, I wanted
• 5:49
  you to buy the cheapest ticket from SFO to JFK, but I never
• 5:53
  would have taken a red eye. Why would you have bought me a
• 5:54
  red eye? Or you know, yes, I wanted you
• 5:57
  to buy that exact shoe, you know, Nike shoe in black in my
• 6:01
  size. But why would you have ever
• 6:03
  bought that without a return policy?
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  I'm never going to, I never would have made it a purchase if
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  I couldn't make a return. So all of the nuances of what
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  specifically gets purchased, you know, it's really going to be
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  disruptive as we start to see chargebacks on those
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  transactions. So world pace role in the
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  ecosystem is to be a launch partner to create innovation and
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  stand up use cases to bring, you know, we represent eight of the
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  10 largest merchants globally. So we can bring those merchants
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  into a sandbox based environment and start to light up some use
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  cases, but really be able to influence how the LLMS or how
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  these other parties are thinking about building protocols in a
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  way that they'll work for the merchants.
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  So that's really what we announced with Open.
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  AI think it's really interesting you mentioned around the way
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  that well paid provides themselves at 8 of the 10
• 6:48
  largest retailers. Then what's good is that you're
• 6:50
  bringing the retailers on board as part of the kind of the
• 6:52
  conversations and really understand how you're going.
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  We don't know how it works right?
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  No one's gone through this process before.
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  So work with the merchant. I think it's absolutely key,
• 6:59
  which is. Great.
• 7:00
  My favorite fun fact. So at World Pays Rethink
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  conference, which is our our client event, we had it in
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  Amsterdam, our European event a couple of weeks ago.
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  And so we had 250 clients in the audience.
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  Collectively, they represented a trillion dollars of payment
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  volume. So a trillion dollars of.
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  The world going to be. Sitting in a room with us and so
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  we did a couple of little QR code questions we first question
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  was how disruptive do you think Agentec commerce is going to be
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  for your business It was like 80 plus percent of people 9 or 10.
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  This is like the most important, you know, moment in, you know,
• 7:32
  my career. The consumer is moving.
• 7:34
  It's gonna be just so disruptive.
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  The big players are gonna be different three years from now.
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  I'm terrified of what it's gonna look like.
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  Second question, have you tried an agentic transaction yet for
• 7:44
  people out of 250 of payments nerds, right?
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  These are like people who run payments at major retailers and
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  care enough about payments to show up at our client event.
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  Four of them had tried an agentic transaction.
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  And then the third question was, is your company already
• 7:59
  launching like a strategic initiative on what you know,
• 8:03
  agentic should look like? And only like 30%.
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  So to me, that's like a very representative of where we are.
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  Like people are terrified. They see the change.
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  It is everyone believes this is gonna transform everything, but
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  no one's tried it yet and the biggest merchants aren't really
• 8:17
  even working on it. So it's I think that's really
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  representative just where we are today.
• 8:22
  Fantastic. Thank you.
• 8:23
  And tell me a little bit more your thoughts on money 2020 so
• 8:26
  far. How's it going for for well pay?
• 8:28
  Yeah, you know, I love and hate money 2020.
• 8:30
  It's like so efficient. I can meet with like 30 to 40
• 8:33
  people in, you know, 48 hours. It's exhausting.
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  I think I already told you my shoe.
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  My, I've wore shoes that are brand new and I'm regretting
• 8:40
  that choice and I'm only a couple hours in.
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  But you know, I think the energy is, is great.
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  It's such an, as I said, so efficient to be able to be here
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  with our clients, our vendors, our partners and be able to to
• 8:55
  really, you know, get so much done in just a few days.
• 8:57
  Fantastic. And lastly, the shelf of shame.
• 8:59
  Cindy, what one thing in payments or things that really
• 9:02
  gets to you that grinds your gears?
• 9:04
  Yeah. So I think it would probably be
• 9:07
  you. You said, you know, what does
• 9:08
  ejectic mean to you? I think two years ago, if we had
• 9:11
  this conversation, and it would be what does orchestration mean
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  to you? I think that people land on a
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  word and the entire conference of the entire industry is
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  talking about the word. But everyone has their own
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  definition of the word and like orchestration, when you're
• 9:23
  talking to engineers, they're talking about internal
• 9:27
  orchestration. And when you're talking in a
• 9:29
  payments, it's like, you know, right now we're everyone uses
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  orchestration to mean a vault that is able to do a forward
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  API. But everybody lands on a very
• 9:38
  specific word, but then let's their themselves have a
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  different definition of it than anyone else has.
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  So it makes it really hard to just converse on some of these
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  topics. I think it's a really, really
• 9:46
  good point. OK, perfect.
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  Thank you so much for your time, Cindy.
• 9:49
  Enjoy the rest of the show. Great.
• 9:50
  Thank you.