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Payments leaders to debate AI, embedded finance, marketplaces and resilience

Thursday, October 15, 2026 — 18:38:12 (UTC)

What's next for acquiring? Payments leaders to debate AI, embedded finance, marketplaces and resilience

Senior leaders from Adyen, Vinted, Revolut, Airwallex, Tide and Checkout.com join the line-up as PSE Consulting's Merchant Acquiring Conference returns to London on 17 November

London, UK, 15 October 2026: PSE Consulting's Merchant Acquiring Conference returns to London on 17 November, marking 15 years of bringing payments leaders together to examine the technologies, business models and risks reshaping merchant acquiring.

Speakers include senior representatives from Adyen, Revolut, ACI Worldwide, Airwallex, Checkout.com, EPI/Wero, Forter, Tide, TrueLayer, Vinted Pay UK and others across the merchant acquiring ecosystem.

Since launching in 2011, the conference has featured more than 160 speakers, welcomed more than 2,000 attendees from over 650 different payments companies and maintained a focus on innovation across the payments ecosystem. Previous programmes have explored developments including open banking, with TrueLayer joining the programme in 2018, and payment orchestration, with Optile, now part of Payoneer, in 2019.

The conference comes as AI begins to change how consumers shop, but has yet to establish itself at scale at the point of purchase. PSE has been researching the shift towards agentic commerce and the changing role of marketplaces through its primary research programme, alongside its work tracking the growth of embedded finance through SaaS platforms.

The company’s recent research among 4,250 AI-active shoppers across the UK, US, Germany and France found that 74% of respondents prefer an independent AI assistant to one built into a single retailer, while 93% expect to use retail marketplaces as much as, or more than, they do today. The findings point to a market in which AI may increasingly influence product discovery, while merchants and marketplaces continue to play a central role in completing the transaction.

PSE’s latest research into the embedded payments among UK small and medium-sized businesses points to a similar shift in where payments relationships are being formed. The research found that 23% of UK SMBs now take an embedded payments service from one of their SaaS platforms, up from 11% in 2024, while 46% have been offered an embedded payments service by a software platform, compared with 22% two years ago.

At this year’s conference, sessions will cover agentic commerce and its implications for B2B payments, the growing payment responsibilities taken on by marketplaces, the next phase of embedded finance and the use of AI to identify and manage synthetic identity fraud and increasingly automated fraudulent activity. The programme will also address PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation, payment orchestration and the convergence of credit and acquiring.

"There's a lot of excitement about agentic commerce and rightly so, but we need to be realistic about where we are," said Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting. "Today the agent is rarely present at the point of purchase. Consumers ask an AI the complicated questions, then go elsewhere to complete the purchase. Where platforms such as Meta have tried to close that gap themselves, they've had to take on much more of the transaction risk and that model is difficult to scale.

"Getting agentic commerce to work at scale is a payments problem as much as an AI one. It needs standards that give consumers a low-friction experience without loading intermediaries with risk. That's a conversation for acquirers, PSPs, schemes and merchants together and it's exactly the one we want to have in the room on 17 November."

The conference is designed for senior payments leaders at merchants, acquirers, payment service providers, card schemes and technology providers. Speakers share first-hand experience and practical lessons, with the programme designed around discussion of the issues facing the market.

The conference takes place on 17 November at Merchant Taylors' Hall, London, running from 9am and closing with networking drinks. The full speaker line-up and agenda are available on the conference website.

Places are limited. To book, visit Merchant Acquiring Conference 2026 - PSE Consulting.

ENDS

About PSE Consulting

PSE Consulting is a leading global provider of payment advisory services to players across the payments landscape. PSE’s expertise has enabled it to deliver actionable market insights and operational optimisation to senior payments leaders for over 30 years.

To learn more, visit: pseconsulting.com/

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Source: Company press release.

Categories: Announcement