Latest / Leaders In Payments / Agentic Commerce Explained with Sanjay Saraf, SVP & Global Chief Product Officer for Merchant Solutions at Fiserv | Episode 477
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea-level leaders from across the payments lens phase.
- 0:07SPEAKER_01: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payments space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
- 0:14SPEAKER_01: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the topic.
- 0:18SPEAKER_02: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
- 0:20SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Greg Myers.
- 0:22SPEAKER_02: And today's special guest is Sanjay Saraf, the SVP and Global Chief Product Officer, Merchant Solutions at Pfizer.
- 0:29SPEAKER_02: So, Sanjay, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
- 0:32SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Greg.
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me here.
- 0:34SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to our conversation.
- 0:36SPEAKER_02: Okay, so before we dive in, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
- 0:44SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: Look, I'm based here in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley.
- 0:48SPEAKER_00: Lots of action that happens here.
- 0:49SPEAKER_00: I've been here for a long, long period of time.
- 0:52SPEAKER_00: Grew up uh originally back in India.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: And you know, most people in India come from the southern part of the country.
- 0:58SPEAKER_00: I come all the way from the north, up in the mountains in Cas.
- 1:01SPEAKER_00: I was born and raised in Kashmir.
- 1:04SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, fast forward, here I am, but been in Bay Area for a long time.
- 1:09SPEAKER_00: And from a personal career standpoint, a lot of people have been in payments for a while, but you know, a lot of people in payments come through either the banking route or have been in finance.
- 1:20SPEAKER_00: I had a bit of an unusual start to my journey in payments and how I became kind of a payments geek.
- 1:27SPEAKER_00: I started my journey more as a merchant in the software industry.
- 1:31SPEAKER_00: And as I was in the software industry and the guru market through uh e-com was still evolving, subscriptions were still coming up back then, for especially for the software industry, and we decided to partner with the early payment providers back then, didn't know anything about payments.
- 1:50SPEAKER_00: We were a software guy, I was a software guy.
- 1:52SPEAKER_00: And then a few years into it, you know, the business really scaled.
- 1:55SPEAKER_00: Like you could see the progression e-comm went at.
- 1:58SPEAKER_00: So we decided like, hey, uh, why not we do it on our own and embed that soft commerce capability within the software?
- 2:06SPEAKER_00: We thought, how hard can it be?
- 2:08SPEAKER_00: And well, we learned payments is not easy.
- 2:12SPEAKER_00: And especially back then, how the APIs and how the ecosystem was built for e-com, you know, a lot has happened since then.
- 2:20SPEAKER_00: But, anyways, that was my start in two payments.
- 2:23SPEAKER_00: We built our own payments ecosystem.
- 2:25SPEAKER_00: We were live in 200 countries, 40-50 million consumers buying and renewing their software, and since then became a payments geek.
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of my intro into payments.
- 2:36SPEAKER_00: Before Pfizer, I was at JP Morgan for five plus years, and uh, you know, have just been in the payment space uh for a while now.
- 2:45SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 2:46SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 2:46SPEAKER_02: Well, we have been at a few of the same companies over the years, so that's that's interesting.
- 2:51SPEAKER_02: Well, today's discussion, we're gonna dive into agentic commerce.
- 2:54SPEAKER_02: It's one of the biggest buzzwords in the industry.
- 2:57SPEAKER_02: So when you say agentic commerce, what's the simplest definition that you use with merchants and what's the key difference between that and just an a normal checkout or a a stored credential type experience?
- 3:10SPEAKER_00: So, Greg, yeah, it's a good question.
- 3:12SPEAKER_00: What is the simplest definition?
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: How we talk about agent e-commerce?
- 3:16SPEAKER_00: The normal checkout is about a consumer showing an intent, and then we as consumers go do a search, and we then have to finally make a decision on what we are trying to buy.
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: And we then also have to go to the next step where we have to pick up like how how am I going to pay for it, and then have to actually physically click on a checkout button and we check out.
- 3:39SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what we are all used to doing.
- 3:41SPEAKER_00: Agent e-commerce changes that quite significantly.
- 3:44SPEAKER_00: Now we have an agent where we define as a consumer what our intent is, and then let the agent or the software essentially takes over, does the discovery, essentially, based on rules you as a consumer set, the agent goes and actually executes and essentially completes that transaction on your behalf, eventually, hopefully, do that without you being actually present in that entire change.
- 4:12SPEAKER_00: So it's just a dramatic change in how an agent e-commerce allows you as a consumer to shop.
- 4:18SPEAKER_00: The experience is completely very transformative.
- 4:21SPEAKER_00: And at the root of it, obviously, is trust.
- 4:23SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but that's how we define agent e-commerce and what's different about it.
- 4:31SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 4:31SPEAKER_02: So at a high level, what changes specifically for the payments industry when, as you said, the software agents do the discovery and the decision and initiates the purchase on the consumer's half.
- 4:42SPEAKER_02: So what changes for us in the in the payments industry?
- 4:45SPEAKER_00: Look, I think all of us who've been in the payments industry, we know that how the payments infrastructure and the whole e-com or the platforms were built by the merchants and by the PSPs.
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: It was built with the assumption that there is a human present at the moment of transaction.
- 5:03SPEAKER_00: So how all the platforms work from an authentication perspective, authorization perspective, or eventually, in some cases, even you know, if things don't go well, then you know, as a consumer, we want to dispute that transaction, that dispute resolution, all of that was designed with the human always present in each of those actions.
- 5:25SPEAKER_00: And that's the model that these platforms were built for.
- 5:27SPEAKER_00: When a software is transacting completely on its own or autonomously, it changes the game.
- 5:34SPEAKER_00: And where it changes the game very significantly is really in that trust layer, right?
- 5:38SPEAKER_00: How do you build trust in that entire value chain of intent, authorization, all the way to actually completing the transaction?
- 5:47SPEAKER_00: And if the transaction still doesn't meet the consumer's expectation, then how does dispute resolution, cancellation, refund, all of that happen is quite different.
- 5:59SPEAKER_00: And that's the fundamental change that the two ecosystems bring.
- 6:04SPEAKER_00: And the difference is quite significant.
- 6:06SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 6:06SPEAKER_02: Well, Pfizer has announced collaborations with both Visa and MasterCard around AgenteCommerce.
- 6:12SPEAKER_02: Visa through the trusted agent protocol and MasterCard through agent pay acceptance framework.
- 6:18SPEAKER_02: So can you explain what each one of those are and how they're similar or different and maybe what problems they solve for the merchants?
- 6:26SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 6:26SPEAKER_00: I think when we talk to merchants, even very sophisticated merchants, while everybody sees the massive shift coming with the number of protocols that have been launched, all with good intention, right?
- 6:39SPEAKER_00: Whether that's one from OpenAI or from Google, Visa, MasterCard, it is overwhelming.
- 6:46SPEAKER_00: It is confusing even for some of our large enterprise merchants that we work with.
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine the state of the small-medium businesses that by now have heard about it and see what's happening.
- 6:58SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing I wanted to emphasize is really like the number of protocols that have been out there, it can get a bit daunting and confusing for the ecosystem.
- 7:07SPEAKER_00: Now, zeroing down on Visa and MasterCard, I mean, they are by de facto like the network that makes things happen globally at scale for any kind of uh commerce transaction.
- 7:19SPEAKER_00: And I think how they have positioned, leveraging the deep expertise and years of transactional history that they've had in this ecosystem, they've come at it in a very pragmatic way and a very complimentary way.
- 7:32SPEAKER_00: While the protocols sound different, it's in the simplest, the simplest way to define what MasterCards is doing.
- 7:39SPEAKER_00: MasterCard is essentially saying, hey, let me ensure what is the customer's intent.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: So it verifies customers' intent to build that security and trust in that transaction.
- 7:52SPEAKER_00: That's the simplest thing.
- 7:54SPEAKER_00: Is what the customer wanted to do, is that intent verifiable through a cryptographic trace that you can trace back.
- 8:02SPEAKER_00: So if there is a dispute or a resolute or any kind of conflict, you can trace back to that intent that this was actually the intent that the consumer had.
- 8:11SPEAKER_00: So they are coming at more from what did the consumer actually authorize the agent to do?
- 8:17SPEAKER_00: Visa has a slight different pivot to it.
- 8:19SPEAKER_00: Visa is saying, hey, is this agent actually authorized to act?
- 8:25SPEAKER_00: So one is talking about intent, one is talking about is this agent really authorized by the consumer to actually act on their behalf?
- 8:34SPEAKER_00: So that's the slight nuance.
- 8:36SPEAKER_00: They're very complementary, but very fundamental to this notion of building trust in this new age of agent e-commerce.
- 8:43SPEAKER_00: That's the simplest definition.
- 8:45SPEAKER_00: So very complimentary, one about intent, one about an identity and the trust layer.
- 8:51SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 8:52SPEAKER_02: Well, as these capabilities roll into your existing FISERV products and services, what should merchants, ISVs, and partners expect, say, from an implementation standpoint?
- 9:02SPEAKER_02: Will this be like enabled in the stack that FISERV provides, or are they going to have to go out and do meaningful integration work depending on whether it's MasterCard or Visa or any of these others?
- 9:12SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 9:13SPEAKER_00: Look, I think that's why the way we are thinking about it is this is where our strength is we are focused on how do we make this complex landscape, lots of protocols coming into play as simple as possible for the merchants, because we at the end of the day, we care about the consumers that they are trying to serve.
- 9:33SPEAKER_00: And so we want to make it easy and simple.
- 9:35SPEAKER_00: So we are trying to simplify this ecosystem by saying, hey, we're gonna take our stack and really make it agent tick ready.
- 9:44SPEAKER_00: And that's why very early on, I felt it was very important for us to really participate closely with the major network ecosystem players like Visa and MasterCard.
- 9:56SPEAKER_00: And that's why we decided to align with them, especially since both of them have such a big focus all the way from the history and tokenization to the trust layer that we just spoke about.
- 10:08SPEAKER_00: So we have been with them through this journey to ensure that our platforms are ready for that, all those protocols primarily focused on trust and safety.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: So for what that means for our merchants is as soon as the industry continues to evolve in scale, if they are integrated to us, we want to make it extremely seamless, no change for them.
- 10:28SPEAKER_00: We will handle all the protocols and essentially execute that transaction, whether it's coming from a human intent or from an agent intent, it should be seamless.
- 10:38SPEAKER_00: More importantly, where I think PfIServe has a unique position and we take it very seriously, is that we want to bring this not just to the large enterprise, we also feel very strongly that we can truly help transform the lives of the small, medium businesses, and how can we bring this agent tech ecosystem to the small medium businesses?
- 10:58SPEAKER_00: As a simple example, you know, you're a restaurant owner, your consumers are now sophisticated, they're going into ChatGPT or Gemini.
- 11:08SPEAKER_00: I'm looking for this particular cuisine in this.
- 11:11SPEAKER_00: I'm in New York and I want to find the best restaurant with these, these, these criteria.
- 11:20SPEAKER_00: And wouldn't it be nice to be in that moment with Gemini, be able to make a reservation or place an order ahead and complete that?
- 11:28SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we are thinking about.
- 11:30SPEAKER_00: How do we bring that level of capability to the small medium business and just give them an opportunity to participate in it without having to put up the large investments that maybe the larger enterprises can afford?
- 11:43SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 11:43SPEAKER_02: And that's always been, you know, as I've learned more and more about the space that I've been kind of concerned about is like what happens to the little guy who's not doesn't have the ability to maybe get discovered in one of the LLMs, what happens to that guy?
- 11:57SPEAKER_02: Whereas today, if it's a person doing it, they may have some affinity to something that they haven't taught their agent about or something, right?
- 12:05SPEAKER_02: And it just always worried that this ends up leaning towards the big guys.
- 12:08SPEAKER_02: But I'm I'm glad to hear you say that about the small, small businesses.
- 12:12SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: For both these merchant categories and the ISVs, the one advice we have, especially for the ISVs and the large enterprises, is to really get their product ecosystem, their product catalogs to become agentic ready.
- 12:30SPEAKER_00: And it's about discoverability.
- 12:32SPEAKER_00: When an agent, an AI agent goes from intent to actually finding the product for you as a consumer.
- 12:39SPEAKER_00: It's paramount that in the past the industry was optimized for SEO, SEM, search engine optimization.
- 12:47SPEAKER_00: Now it's about agent tech discovery, and it's a little different.
- 12:51SPEAKER_00: And I think the industry is starting to pick up on it.
- 12:53SPEAKER_00: But that's where we are working with the larger enterprises to say, like, hey, how do you get your catalogs be more discoverable so that you can retain your consumer experience that you're delivering in a very seamless manner?
- 13:08SPEAKER_00: For the small and medium businesses that are on our platform, that's the advantage they have, is because I have their products, we have the full catalog, and we're focused on without needing any investment from them to get our catalogs on, especially on our market leading product lower, to say, hey, how do I get that product catalog become extremely agentic ready and bring that benefit to the small and medium businesses?
- 13:34SPEAKER_00: So we're making that personal commitment and investment for our SMB merchants.
- 13:38SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, great to hear.
- 13:40SPEAKER_02: So when we look at it from a merchant outcome perspective, where do you expect the earliest ROI to show up?
- 13:47SPEAKER_02: Is it higher conversions, lower fraud, lower support costs?
- 13:51SPEAKER_02: What are the things that you think are going to show the biggest ROI sooner?
- 13:56SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 13:56SPEAKER_00: I mean, while it's a it's a combination of those things that you just spoke about, but we strongly feel as we talk to a lot of the merchants of various different size and scale, like author approval and conversion and speed has been a big focus for all the merchants over uh over the over the history of uh e-com.
- 14:15SPEAKER_00: But I think in this particular case, almost everyone is placing trust higher than everything else that matters, right?
- 14:24SPEAKER_00: So so trust is what is going to either make or break the case for agent e-commerce going forward.
- 14:32SPEAKER_00: And the ROI is gonna come not necessarily from higher conversion, but from really, really targeted personalization.
- 14:40SPEAKER_00: And then in particular, where it's gonna play a big role is really helping reduce fraud, chargebacks, and disputes.
- 14:50SPEAKER_00: Because now you have a clear intent that the consumer, it's an immutable record of what the consumer wanted to do.
- 14:57SPEAKER_00: You know, in the past I've seen in the travel industry somebody goes and stays in a in a in a vacation spot and says like and then comes back and does a chargeback.
- 15:06SPEAKER_00: Oh, you know, the bedroom was not ocean-facing.
- 15:10SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's a high, very high risk, that's why in that industry, in the travel industry, because the disputes are slightly higher.
- 15:18SPEAKER_00: But here in AgenTic, if you've booked it through an AgenTech experience, the intent is very fixed, like it's well defined, will definitely lead to lower disputes and chargebacks than than we have seen in the past.
- 15:31SPEAKER_00: So the merchants will definitely benefit from that.
- 15:33SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Okay.
- 15:34SPEAKER_02: So the next question is really about whether you think the enterprise merchants will benefit first and then it'll trickle down to small businesses.
- 15:43SPEAKER_02: What are your thoughts on that?
- 15:45SPEAKER_02: And then that how might that differ, or will it differ at all, whether it's MasterCard or Visa or either approach?
- 15:51SPEAKER_00: I mean, clearly initial focus investments are coming in the large enterprise category.
- 15:58SPEAKER_00: But what I'm also seeing is that even within the large enterprise, the first sector that the industry is really going after, interestingly, is not your pure play econ.
- 16:10SPEAKER_00: They're going after retail industries that have both an online present and offline presence.
- 16:16SPEAKER_00: And if the industry is going to really for index more on that end, which is what we what we are seeing, like Walmarts of the world, the Home Depots of the world are getting engaged in this space in this earlier phase, I think that will also hopefully, in at least our hope is that will also mean that it will go towards the SMB also relatively soon.
- 16:37SPEAKER_00: But it will take players like Pfizer, where that's why we made a commitment that we're going to focus a lot on the SMB to really drive this sooner for the SMB than how it wouldn't naturally occur.
- 16:49SPEAKER_00: We've always seen all these transformations happen predominantly on the large enterprise side and only then trickle down.
- 16:56SPEAKER_00: And we're hoping to balance that out at least from a Pfizer perspective.
- 17:00SPEAKER_00: And I think we have a large footprint to help make make that difference.
- 17:04SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 17:04SPEAKER_02: Well, let's talk a little bit about the hype versus the reality.
- 17:08SPEAKER_02: So you mentioned the Home Depots of the world, but where are you seeing like real early adoption today?
- 17:13SPEAKER_02: What or what specific use cases are are most what I'd say agent ready right now?
- 17:19SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think almost every day there's some sort of a press release by either the tech companies or or even large retailers in this space.
- 17:28SPEAKER_00: So if we distill down the noise, I think the two areas that we see, at least we are seeing, that are pretty prime, where we are going to see much more faster traction and more meaningful traction.
- 17:41SPEAKER_00: One is where the use cases where your intent is very clear and what you're trying to get as a consumer, what you're trying to buy is very well defined.
- 17:50SPEAKER_00: And that happens to be in things like travel.
- 17:53SPEAKER_00: Like you know exactly the day you are and want to travel, where you're traveling to.
- 17:57SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna see a little bit of this adoption coming into travel.
- 18:00SPEAKER_00: You can clearly set an agent for you to that says, hey, I'm going to New York from this day to this day, find me the best cheapest flight, and if you find it for this much, just book it.
- 18:11SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna see a little bit of that happen in the travel and hospitality industry.
- 18:15SPEAKER_00: But interestingly, I clearly see, and we've seen talking to our merchants, where I think it can truly transform is really in the B2B space.
- 18:24SPEAKER_00: Invoice payments, supplier payments.
- 18:27SPEAKER_00: Those are very manual, intensive activities that happen today.
- 18:33SPEAKER_00: A lot of cost associated with them.
- 18:36SPEAKER_00: They're very prime for agent e-commerce.
- 18:38SPEAKER_00: You know, you know exactly the type of invoices that your company has to pay, you know the suppliers.
- 18:44SPEAKER_00: Can I just set the rules and say, hey, just go execute based on these parameters?
- 18:49SPEAKER_00: And I so B2B is, I think, is gonna surprise us that I think agent e-commerce is gonna play a pretty big role in in the B2B space.
- 18:56SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because I was talking to someone yesterday about the same topic, and they were saying in the B2B space, you know, even today there are agents, obviously, coders are using a lot of AI to write code.
- 19:10SPEAKER_02: And if that AI agent says maybe it needs to go purchase something to make that code work, that today a lot of that is starting to happen to where you know the person doing the coding doesn't have to do it.
- 19:22SPEAKER_02: The agent itself is going to go do that.
- 19:24SPEAKER_02: So it's another kind of B2B use case.
- 19:26SPEAKER_00: 100%.
- 19:27SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
- 19:28SPEAKER_00: No, totally you're spot on.
- 19:30SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 19:30SPEAKER_02: So, you know, when you step back, what what should merchants and ISVs be doing, say, in the next six to twelve months to be ready for this?
- 19:38SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think the first and foremost thing is as I mentioned at the start, like, you know, our industry has seen various different evolutions come.
- 19:46SPEAKER_00: And I think the the most recent one that maybe some of us can recall and remember is like the the metaverse.
- 19:53SPEAKER_00: You know, that that was also going to be a pretty breakthrough things.
- 19:56SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Facebook changed their name from Facebook to Meta, that we're gonna transact in the metaverse.
- 20:01SPEAKER_00: We will all have avatars and we will have stores in the in and some of the luxury brands already set up stores and in the in the metaverse.
- 20:09SPEAKER_00: And that did not play out.
- 20:12SPEAKER_00: That fizzled out pretty quick.
- 20:14SPEAKER_00: This is real, this is transformative, this is gonna happen.
- 20:18SPEAKER_00: And so, what we are telling our ISVs and our merchants of all sizes, get ready.
- 20:24SPEAKER_00: This will transform.
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: It is good for you as the as a merchant, but your consumers are gonna expect it, right?
- 20:30SPEAKER_00: The consumers are already moving in this direction.
- 20:33SPEAKER_00: And so getting your platforms and your strategies aligned to this change coming is important.
- 20:40SPEAKER_00: Getting educated is important, and then doing very basic things, which I talked about, like being very aware of the fact that discoverability is going to be very different going forward, which means how are your products going to get discovered?
- 20:55SPEAKER_00: So that is an area of immediate attention and focus, even if the true full-blown agent might take time.
- 21:02SPEAKER_00: But that whole discoverability of your products is an area that we are advising our customers and merchants to really put a lot of focus on immediately.
- 21:11SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 21:12SPEAKER_02: Well, one final question.
- 21:14SPEAKER_02: If you had to give your merchants and partners one takeaway from this episode, what would that be?
- 21:19SPEAKER_00: Look, I think the one key takeaway is as you think about agent e-commerce, it's centered on trust.
- 21:26SPEAKER_00: So product discovery is one part, but it's all about how you will build trust in that ecosystem.
- 21:34SPEAKER_00: And hence how you really align with your processors or your partners in delivering this experience, you have to make sure that the way the transactions are going to get executed are centered on a platform that has put a very heavy emphasis on trust and security, and it goes beyond the basic tokenization, which is all expected.
- 22:00SPEAKER_00: At this point.
- 22:01SPEAKER_00: But really, the platform is built for that notion of how do I verify the intent, all the cryptographic, the setups that the protocols expect.
- 22:11SPEAKER_00: You have to make sure that you're kind of ready and have your you know part either you're doing it on your own if you're a large merchant, but if you're working with partners like us, you know, you have to make sure that you're picking a partner that is pretty ready with that trust ecosystem built into the offering from an end-to-end perspective.
- 22:29SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 22:29SPEAKER_02: Well, Sanjay, this has been a great episode, and I know your time's very valuable, so I want to be sensitive to that.
- 22:36SPEAKER_02: But thank you so much for being on the show today.
- 22:38SPEAKER_02: It's very interesting where we're headed with Agentic Commerce.
- 22:41SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate you sharing your concepts and ideas and wisdom around the topic.
- 22:45SPEAKER_02: So again, thank you so much for being here.
- 22:47SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
- 22:48SPEAKER_00: I'm sure as we progress, we're gonna we're we're gonna be witnessing something truly transformational around us.
- 22:54SPEAKER_00: So thanks for picking this topic and thanks for having me on the on your show.
- 22:57SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
- 22:58SPEAKER_02: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
- 23:00SPEAKER_02: And until the next story.
- 23:02SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
- 23:06SPEAKER_01: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
- 23:13SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.