The fraud, payments, and agentic topics UK merchants can’t stop talking about – Forter

Everyone knows AI is the next big thing, the current big thing, the thing that’s going to change everything for fraud, payments, and digital leaders. What to do about it is the biggest conversation.

IMPACT Europe brings together digital commerce, payments, and fraud leaders from the world’s biggest brands to discuss what’s working and what they’re working on. It was impossible to attend all of the panel discussions and roundtables, but we tried anyway. These are the five most resonant topics that we heard come up over and over again.

1. The grey area in agentic commerce: Who owns the decisions?

Agentic AI enables fraud at scale. Some merchants consider credential security and cloning risk to be the next frontier. Traditional fraud detection wasn’t built to tell an AI agent from a bad bot, leading merchants to block all bot traffic by default. They need to distinguish between the two types of bot.

Similarly, payment processors haven’t agreed on what counts as a genuine transaction when it’s initiated by an agent rather than a human shopper. Until that’s resolved, merchants won’t have a clear answer for who must absorb the cost when an agent buys the wrong item.

The most important thing merchants can do is move from behaviour to identity, understanding the human behind the agent.

2. GEO+SEO is the new SEO

Agentic commerce consists of more browsing at the moment. For an agent to recommend a product, it has to be able to find the product. Agentic readiness starts with product data that’s machine-readable. If it gets trapped in legacy silos or blocked by bot-mitigation tools, the agent will move on to the next website, which means that SEO and GEO are converging.

One speaker advised merchants to check their Content Delivery Network settings before accidentally blocking the AI crawlers they’re trying to attract, and start monitoring how often their brand actually gets cited in AI-generated answers. Another framed the real bottleneck as product data quality, not the crawling itself, with direct product feeds eventually replacing crawling entirely.

3. A decline costs more than the sale

When a transaction gets declined, the lost sale is just scratching the surface. Forter data shows that customers whose first purchase gets declined are 15.5 percentage points less likely to return to the brand. That means the decline wastes everything you’ve already spent on marketing, acquisition, customer service, technology, and potentially loyalty.

Merchants are actively shifting their mindset from stopping more bad transactions to approving more good transactions, and testing how far they can increase thresholds and improve authorisation and conversion without introducing fraud or liability risks. Creating frictionless checkout experiences for good shoppers makes it easier for them to become repeat customers, the bedrock of any brand.

Total cost of conversion is a more meaningful metric than fraud loss.

4. Global sales still run through local rails

A local wallet in Poland reaching 85% adoption among existing customers. A four-fold conversion increase in Brazil after adding a local payment method. A 1.5% conversion lift in another market after adding Cash App as a payment method.

These anecdotes highlight that a big-name global PSP isn’t necessarily going to be the top performer. Cross-border growth comes down to an adaptable, country-specific infrastructure. The same goes for operations: Another merchant discussed standing up 10 new local entities and bank accounts in under a year to enable local acquiring and same-currency settlement.

5. Old regulation still impacts new problems

As agentic commerce forces merchants to adapt to the future, they’re still reckoning with the past. Implementing 3DS exemptions under PSD2 is a sore spot for many. Bank behaviour is inconsistent, decline codes are opaque, and technical cooperation is difficult to get even at enterprise scale.

Though PSD3 and PSR, the legislative package expected to take full effect late next year, aim to solve those issues, some merchants remain jaded. They remember PSD2’s rollout as slow and painful. The absence of standardised APIs means Open Banking adoption in eCommerce remains low across the region.

Join the Agentic Commerce Collective

IMPACT is just one day. The spirit of digital leaders from the world’s biggest brands coming together to solve their biggest challenges lives on with the Agentic Commerce Collective. Every month, we host roundtable discussions about what’s happening now and what’s coming next.

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