Want to read a blog about how we had some great conversations at a recent fintech conference? You’ve come to the wrong place. In the following paragraphs, I share my thoughts on a changing world, reinforced by what I saw and heard at Money Motion in Croatia last week.
Sure, we met some super smart people doing amazing things in payments. But it’s what I sensed at the event that stood out most, chief amongst which was the air of uncertainty. Whereas up until very recently, it was clear that financial services innovators were on a mission to change the world, the mood at this major event was more about how businesses were going to harness forces beyond their control.
Let me expand. For the best part of the past 25 years, the narrative has been one of predictable globalisation. For decades, payments conferences were defined by a “pick-and-mix” approach to technology, where a vendor’s origin mattered far less than their ability to deliver scale and interoperability.
However, this somewhat cosy club of global payments is starting to fragment; it’s being replaced by a powerful push for regional autonomy and a growing fear of dependency. Whether that’s the EU’s determination to take ownership of local payment rails or regional players “pulling down the shutters”, it’s external winds of change that are the main event.
Your agent will see you now: the new architecture shaping customer experience
As the industry moves away from global interconnectedness, the technology filling the void is becoming increasingly autonomous. A recurring theme during the event was the evolution of AI assistants – a shift that is set to be defined over the next five years by two game-changing concepts: agentic shopping and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
How AI and autonomous protocols are reshaping the payments landscape
Agentic shopping is one of the strongest signs of the rapidly approaching post-app world. Here’s how it works: rather than a consumer manually opening a banking or shopping app to make a purchase, an AI agent will act on their behalf, seeking out the best price and the most efficient payment path.
This shift will seriously disrupt account-to-account (A2A) payments, bypassing the 1.5 to 3 per cent interchange fees associated with traditional card schemes. This presents a major opportunity for fragmented markets – such as the EU or specific regional players – to offer faster, cheaper alternatives that AI agents will naturally prioritise.
Furthermore, if the last decade was defined by the API, the next will be defined by the MCP. While APIs enable two specific programmes to communicate, MCP is an open standard that allows AI models to securely access real-time data and tools – such as a payments testing engine.
AI and the one per cent risk
Yet, while AI is bringing benefits to businesses and consumers, it has also created risks – one of which is 99 per cent accuracy.
We are seeing large financial institutions tasking partners with using AI in the hope that they will reduce testing costs by 25 per cent. Unfortunately, the drive to cut overheads is undermined by AI’s predilection for making a small but unacceptable number of mistakes.
In payments, where millisecond-perfect timestamps and unique hex codes are the difference between success and a security breach, 99 per cent accuracy is a failure.
The way to overcome these teething problems is to close the gap between AI innovation and engineering precision. At Iliad Solutions, we have developed an MCP that allows AI to talk to our t3 testing engine. In this model, the AI generates the bulk of the test cases, while our engine acts as the expert middleware to:
- Correct the one per cent error rate to achieve 100 per cent precision.
- Execute tests in a real-time, encrypted environment.
- Feed results back into the AI loop for continuous analysis.
The commercial imperative for bulletproof foundations
So, I bring this blog to a close with a message that the era of “collaboration for collaboration’s sake” is ending. The insights from Money Motion suggest we are heading into a storm of regionalism and autonomous tech. Success will most likely rest on possessing both an AI strategy and the tools to ensure AI agents are operating on a bulletproof, tested foundation.
As the world becomes more insular, businesses must be certain their systems work flawlessly when key nodes in the global system are turned off.
To find out more about how Iliad Solutions is bridging the gap between AI and testing precision, email us at info@iliad-solutions.com today.
Anthony Walton, CEO Iliad Solutions