Latest / Leaders In Payments / Agentic Development For Payments with Casey Conley, Payroc | Episode 534

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Agentic Development For Payments with Casey Conley, Payroc | Episode 534 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Greg Myers.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: Today I'm honored to have as my special guest Casey Conley, the Chief Product Officer at Payrock.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, Casey, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to the conversation.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, this is a special episode focused on the future of payments development and how AI and agentic development are changing the way software gets built.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about PayRock for developers, what it means to be AI native, but not AI only, and how PayRock is giving developers more speed, flexibility, and autonomy while still providing the human expertise that payments often requires.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: So with that, Casey, let's start with a little about you.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: So tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your professional journey, and your role at Payrock.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit about myself.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Born and raised in Colorado, been in payments now for about 20 years, 25 years.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Been a unique path for me.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Started as an entrepreneur, kind of doing some payment consulting for PhiServe and some other folks.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Took a step back out of payments, did program project management, some technology stuff for the likes of CenturyLink and Quest.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then went on a journey with Mercury Payment Systems in the integrated space through Vantiv, through WorldPay, all the way through FIS, starting as a product manager and ending as an SVP there, managing over a hundred and so products.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, right about the time of COVID, I decided to join PayRock and really stand up the product function, take on a CPO role that was newly formed there.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just a really good time for me to take a step back from Fortune 500 and kind of get back into a little bit more.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get innovative, let's build, and let's get on the forefront of technology.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of my quick journey through the payment space.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: So for those who may not be familiar, can you give us a quick overview of Payrock?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're a full service processor and acquirer.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: We support every single solitary partner type in the ecosystem from agents, ISOs, embedded software providers, ISVs, FIs, and banks.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: We have a full stack platform from card not present to card present globally with a few of the acquisitions we've had.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we're really a partner first white glove human support organization.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: I know we're going to talk a lot about AI today, so we'll kind of get into that.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we also believe very much that people do business with people and uh technology is there to support it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we do it all in the payment space.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, agentic development is a term that we hear more and more.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: So in plain terms, what is actually changing in how software gets built and why does that matter for payments?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Typically in payments, the old way, the old model developers really had to understand read docs, write integration code.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: They had to understand everything from authorization to settlement to money movement.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And now in the new model using AI, developers can start to interact with payment providers like PayRock using human language and AI as a tool.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to integrate card-present payments into my solution so that I can type of language.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And AI has taken some of that expertise out of the backside and the complexities of that integration and allowed them to focus more on the end result and how do they want to do it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot there, but it kind of took the hand holding out of building out of it.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: The program manager, the project manager, the I need to open up access to API keys.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I have to understand the code, develop to the spec, test to the spec.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: AI does a lot of those tasks for us now, which is a big change.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it's interesting because when you say AI, I mean, there's so many parts to it, right?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're talking about just the agentic development part.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: So just want the audience to kind of know that, you know, we're very focused on that right now.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: So what was the signal for you and the team at Payrock that agentic development wasn't just hype, wasn't just something that was going to go away, but a meaningful shift that you needed to build a strategy around?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: First and foremost, our delivery model really started to change using agentic and AI.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: We started to partner our product folks with our developers a lot closer.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was no longer, hey, write me a 10-page spec.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go to enterprise architecture and architect this entire solution and then go into a build, test, and launch phase.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Internally, we partnered our product folks.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: We went to a two or a three-page, what are we trying to accomplish sort of model, partnered our product folks with one or two development resources and said, hey, go build, stop all the other stuff, remove all the ceremonies and everything that gets in the way, and let's just go build product.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And our development cycles went way down, the quality of the product we were releasing went way up.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we were starting to see the success.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then coming from our sales channels, there were a number of moments where talking with Khan, who you've interviewed before, and a few other folks in the organization, we really started to run into these, I'll say non-technical software providers that, again, are using AI and Agentic to build new solutions, but with zero knowledge of payments, with zero knowledge of how to integrate those payments.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they were coming to us with a lot of requests.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And as a product team, we started to see that shift.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that shift forced our product strategy with our internal development model and those new kinds of customers coming to us to really look at how we support integration into payments.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: We were putting a lot of stress on our integrations team, on our program management team, on our sales solutions teams.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we said, hey, we have to look at this a little bit different and allow these people to integrate a lot faster and not become payments experts and try to step up so quick.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, PayRock describes when they're talking about PayRock for developers, its approach as AI native, but not AI only, which I love, by the way.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what's the distinction you're trying to make there?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: And why was that important to the way you designed PayRock for developers?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: So AI native was really about speed.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And not AI only is about knowing exactly where you still want the human in that flow.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: We all know payments is highly regulated, money movement, disputes, chargebacks.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of things you have to know about there.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And our sort of take from Payrock on it was let's build AI into the substrate of what we're doing.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Let's expose different agents and jobs and tasks to help developers handle a lot of that.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: But let's really also understand where the human needs to make the decision.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So again, this is about agentic development, and this is about agents speeding up that development.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: We really wanted to make sure that developers and integrators into our platform were taking the time to really focus on the problems they wanted to solve and really take the machine readable.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do I understand the spec?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: How do I do this?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: How do I do that?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: The simple thing that everyone needs to do out of the equation for them.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So really taking that developer, helping them understand where their time and their effort needs to be focused, and taking a lot of those automated, repetitive, spec understanding sort of guide rail tasks off of them and allowing, you know, agentic development to kind of handle that for them.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And as I said earlier in the first question, we're a very human first company.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's in our DNA.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want partners to come to our website, not be engaged with our folks, but we want to help people solve their problems.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to teach them about payments and help them understand how to integrate to us.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: That can all be handled by a gentic code.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to be, you know, their trusted partner who helps them differentiate their solution, helps them build new products that solve other people's problems.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And really where we are with AI native and not AI only is understanding where those lines are.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, as you mentioned, a lot of companies are adding AI features to existing products.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: In your opinion, what does it mean to actually design developer experience for agenc development from the ground up?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Most companies retrofit AI.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: They put a chat bot on top of their existing doc services.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: They put a chat bot on their developer integration site.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: So ask questions, get answers, point them at those specs.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: We took a different approach at Payrock.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: We said, hey, let's build a dedicated entry point, payrock.ai.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And rather than build a page buried in marketing and everywhere else, let's put that page front and center.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we use AI within our developer experience to developer comes in.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I want to X.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: I want to integrate card present payments into my existing solution.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: AI will build that solution for them.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: It'll point them at all the right agents and all the right documentation.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then it feeds directly into whatever tool of their choice is.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we use Claude.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's all kinds of development tools out there.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: We built our platform and the capability for those agents to work with the tool of their choice.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have to understand a tool.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have to change their development methodology.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we really built our developer experience around agentic, agentic coding, like you said, from the ground up.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't layer it on top of what we already have and fall back on our old ways, processes, and policies.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: One of the big value props or promises here is really to build payments in minutes and not months.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: And payments integration, I mean, you've been in this industry a long time as well.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: Historically, these integrations have been very complex and pretty people dependent.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: So what has changed that makes that kind of speed, build payments in minutes even possible?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's the tools, it's the agents, it's the way we wrap stuff around it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Agentic Commerce, I want to hit on this a little bit.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of the Wild West right now.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of different standards, different security models, different where a human's in the loop, where a human isn't in the loop.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some companies 100% rely on AI and agentic code, which I firmly believe can over-engineer and make things a lot more complex than they did.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of took a different approach and we said, hey, let's take this from the integration side of the house.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: We believe our partners, our software providers that are building payments into their platform, they understand their market and the problems they're trying to solve.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take the integration to payments complexity out of that.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're spot on in what you said.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes me laugh a little bit.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: We used to talk about in board meetings and with our ISV leaders, we've just signed a new ISV or a new partner.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: We won't have them integrated and making revenue for another four to six months.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to take us three months to integrate.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to take us another month or two to really start to ramp up and test all that.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then they'll start going into it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, like I said, by taking the approach of let's solve that integration problem, let's solve that speed to revenue problem.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: ISBs, all of them, agents and ISOs, they see payments as a big revenue generator for them as well.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's software and payment revenue.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, we took the approach of everything that can be automated, let's automate.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we automated getting test keys for them to start testing their code.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: We automated solutioning with human language of here are the things I'm trying to do.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we will actually build that solution.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I want to use a hosted payment page with Google and Apple Pay to put on my website.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the solution, here's the agents you need to look at, here's how you plug those into your code.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Same with CardPresent and everything else.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we kind of made the integration portion of that, the speed to revenue portion of that, the core of what we were doing.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, took a different angle on it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then with that, by using a Gentic development, our developers can come back at any time.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they can say, I want to add, and I keep going to mobile wallets and APMs and all that, because they we get a lot of requests for those.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, I've done my standard payment integration.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting a ton of requests for Apple Pay on my device or hosted checkout page.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: I want to add that to my solution.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they have their developer sandbox.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: They can go back at any time.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: It'll point them at the right jobs, it'll point them at the right agents.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then those agents integrated with their agentic coding are able to add those without fully understanding that spec and everything on the backside.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I think keeping that conversation going, if I'm a developer or increasingly, as you said, like an AI agent working with a developer, what does that experience building with Payrock look like when you kind of get into like the discovery and documentation and sandboxes and testing and launch and all of those kind of gory details of getting a product to market?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: What does that start to look like?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: What's that experience with payrock now?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: It actually gets really easy.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: We've had a number of partners start to integrate and play with it.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've had our developer integrations team that followed the old traditional way, the head of that.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: He was the first one to pilot our developer experience.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: So he went to developers.payrock.com.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I want to start taking payments on my website with custom hosted fields.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he talked in human language to our agent on the website that spit out a plan for him on here's the agents you need to do this.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the specs that those are pointed at, and here's what you need to load in your agentic coding tool of choice.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: He was able to take those and load them into our developer portal where he gets automatically his API test keys, his integration plan, his testing plan.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he's able to integrate that into his solution and test it against those test keys.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: We've had customers and internal folks that have been able to go through that entire process and take their first payment within 35 minutes of interacting with our website.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we're talking about time frames that used to be three and a half or four months.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: So another major theme that we want to touch on is more ways to build.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: So you're building in this developer flexibility.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: So why is that so important?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: And how different might the right integration path look from one software company to another?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, ISVs and software providers and vertical SaaS providers embed payments in so many different ways.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: We find ourselves consulting with these companies all the time, and they all want to find different unique ways to do things.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even at PayRock, as the chief product officer, I laugh, but I have to support traditional agent and ISO distribution with products and services for them to sell and take to market.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: We have to support our FIs with different POS solutions and different verticalized software.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have our embedded channel as well that go to market in a million different ways.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Some embedded software providers, they want to be able to refer and they don't want to know anything about payments.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: They want to integrate to us, they want to be able to refer those merchant accounts when they sell their sale.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: They want us to handle that sale for them and sell it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: And others want to own more of that ecosystem.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They want to embed the sign-up process, the contracting process, and they want to control the experience beginning to end.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: So what we've really kind of standardized around PayRock is there is no one way.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: There is no right way.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we've built our tools and we've built our portal really around the right path depends on who we're talking to.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Are we talking to somebody in unattended?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Are we talking to somebody in unattended EV charging versus unattended retail or concession stands or Coke machines?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of them have different ways of doing things.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And as we've talked about AI and AI first and AI native and all of that as well, the honest truth is we believe that people should be making those decisions.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to support all of those different models that do it.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we want our developers spending their time on.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we want to spend our time on is helping our developers solve those problems, not the integration side of it.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why we've kind of headed down this developer experience path, this agentic AI modeling sort of methodology is that one size doesn't fit all.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's this balance between developer autonomy and human expertise.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've talked about that a little bit.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: So where does the self-service, you know, where does that make the biggest difference?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: And where do you believe the human touch still really matters when it comes to payments?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Self-service wins where things are mechanical, they're repetitive, sandbox provisioning, boilerplate, like straightforward auth, straightforward capture, support docs, and questions around those.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Human expertise still matters in the middle.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the truth is in payments, you make a mistake, there are big ramifications.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're in money movement, you're in compliance, you're in risk.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the big things we're big at payrock is our consumer choice and our surcharging products.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of compliance around all of those.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Those decisions matter.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Agentic coding and all of that.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: It can integrate those things, but like I said, there's certain compliance things.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes a business risk if I do it wrong.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the human expertise and the human portion of it comes in.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And if you were to go out and play with our dev site, our new developer portal, I think you'd find that that standard, repetitive, mechanical things that used to take people forever to do.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Read those specs, understand those specs, put those solutions together.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we automated.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: And finding that balance between compliance, money movement, business risk in my solution and integrating into payments is really where that human element still comes in.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we find even in the development that we do, that's where my product team and our development organization really spends the majority of their time talking about how to solve those problems, make them reliable, take the risk out of those processes, not the integration, not the take a payment, not the auth a standard transaction.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that fine line between human and AI.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, AI is a tool, it should be used as a tool.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we've had our instances and everyone will.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's still new where we've relied too heavy and we've had other people rely too heavy on it only to find out that yeah, we weren't compliant and we did something wrong.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So finding that balance is is critical for everybody in the payment space.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about vertical SaaS companies a little bit and let's go to sort of the payoff, is what I'm going to call it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're a CTO or a product leader at a vertical SaaS company, how does improving the developer experience translate beyond just the engineering, just getting the product to market?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like, is it faster time to market?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is it product differentiation?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Is it ultimately the monetization?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe talk about the payoff, the real value beyond just the engineering part of this.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a number of things here.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, faster integration to a payment company obviously converts directly into faster time to revenue.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: The less I'm spending focusing on integrating to my payment provider, integrating payments in my flow.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if we were three to six months, as we've talked about, down to a week, that's faster time to revenue, getting my residuals, I'm getting my commissions, I'm getting my Rev share, a lot, lot quicker.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's also a materially better developer experience for the developers that are doing it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: ISBs can actually talk to their customers about capabilities that we provide and add them at a faster scale.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they're solving problems for customers as well.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a capability we provide in embedded lending or finance or something that one of their customers wants or they want to embed in their solution, they can do that a lot faster and get faster time to revenue there as well.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then really the big one for me, and we see this a lot too, is it like the payments integration is no longer a distraction.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've been in this business for 20, 25 years.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've been in integrated payments now for 15 years.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: How many times I had the conversation with an integrated software provider about I can't start that or put that on my roadmap for another three months because we have five other things we have to do.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: It really allows that integrated provider and that software person to say, you know what?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: 95% of my time is serving my customers.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And solving their problems and differentiating my product, not I need to carve out a quarter of my developers' time to learn, integrate, and test our payments integration.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe that's a huge benefit for those software providers.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, looking ahead a few years, how do you see agenda development changing payments more broadly?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the first part.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then what should software companies and payments companies be preparing for right now?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is a tough question for me.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Near-term code, test generation, everything we've talked about really accelerating software development and being able to build in faster timelines is probably the near term.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Medium term, I see platforms starting to evolve to as your partner, and this just isn't in payments, but as your partners or your integrated partners, I mean, in the restaurant space, everybody uses DoorDash and all the other different integrations.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: So medium term, you start to get into how do I change that integration and take advantage of the new features those companies are releasing to me in a timely fashion and automate all of that.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then longer term and more a broader bet, which between me and you and your audience and who we're listening to, I don't know when that time comes.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, everything's so accelerating right now.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I think AIA agents really do become a second user.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: You start to automate shopping flows and buying flows and payment flows for individuals, and those agents that you build into your software really start to be self-evolving and taking advantage of new functionality without developers even really getting into the mix and being involved.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I know that's a longer-term sort of bet and to be prepared for, but we at Payrock looked at AI agents and agentic agents as another user.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Longer term, they could be the standard user.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: It is going to be interesting times in payments in the next few years.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we always say that in payments, like it seems like we always have for at least the last 10 or 15 years.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: But I truly think with agents potentially taking over so much of the buying, it's going to be interesting.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not really talking today about what AI can do and all of that type of stuff.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: But longer term, I think AI and those agents really will become the customer.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you're right.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: For 20 years we've been talking about all the change in payments.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to continue and it's going to accelerate for sure.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: So one final question.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: So if a developer or an ISV listening today wanted to start building with payrock, what's the one thing you'd want them to know before they start?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Start at payrock.ai and docs.payrock.com.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: All the skills and all the tools and all of it is there and it's available for you.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Fast doesn't always mean unsupervised.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: I really think that's a big thing.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: The self-service speed is real, but the human expertise and the human components are still really, really part of the equation and actually needed.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: And last but not least, I think Payrock, honestly, we've moved from over the last six to 12 months, Payrock's really moved from just a processor to we're a fintech.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting into this AI agentic coding game in a pretty big way.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we're here and we're excited about it.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's my closing.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Casey, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: I know your time's very valuable.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you so much for being on today.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate it.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate it as well.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: And until the next story.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 25:57
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