Elavon CEO: Trust, Not Speed, Is the Key to Agentic Commerce

Elavon CEO: Trust, Not Speed, Is the Key to Agentic Commerce

Wally Mlynarski, CEO of Elavon, the merchant acquirer owned by Bank of America, said in an interview during the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas that security and soundness should take priority over speed in advancing agentic commerce. He noted that since the rise of e-commerce, the industry has spent 25 years grappling with fraud, and risk controls such as card verification codes, PCI data security standards, and manually keyed transactions were gradually built up through that process.

Mlynarski believes agentic commerce could repeat the same mistakes, or it could put security and soundness at its core from the outset. He also pointed to the mobile wallet battles of the 2010s, noting that Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and later Paze—launched jointly by several major banks—all tried to rationalize the economics among consumers, merchants, acquirers, issuers, and card networks, but with considerable difficulty.

According to Mlynarski, Paze is operated by Early Warning Services, which is owned by seven large U.S. banks including Bank of America. The wallet can be embedded into agentic commerce flows and address the hallucination problem of AI agents. Mlynarski said Paze is "ready to pilot." He also noted that Meta has integrated Stripe's Link digital wallet to provide payment for its personal AI agent Muse, and consumers have begun using Instinct and OpenAI's dots, but these explorations may not have fully considered security and soundness.

Source: https://www.bankingdive.com/news/elavon-ceo-trust-not-speed-will-rule-agentic-commerce/873117/