Agentic Winners Will Be Determined by Trust Not Tech: A Case Study on Our Work with Ecommpay
The latest Ecommpay research found that the biggest barrier to agentic commerce is not technology or awareness — it is consumer trust at the point of payment. Consumers are comfortable letting AI research and compare products, but the comfort evaporates at checkout.
New white paper from Ecommpay brings merchant and consumer opinion on agentic commerce together for the first time. Read on for the results – and for more about the role we played in researching and writing this paper.
Half of the consumers, surveyed in France, UK, Spain, Italy, and Germany, would not trust an agent with their card details, and just 13.9% want an agent completing purchases, even with their approval. The buck stops at the point of financial control, and consumers are not ready to hand it over.
That hesitation is matched by uncertainty on the other side of the transaction. With no clear framework yet for liability or disputes in an agentic context, merchants are left exposed when something goes wrong. Some are building agentic checkout directly into their own platforms to retain control. This is a workable short-term fix, but not one that scales will want to own the checkout experience themselves.
The risk is not just commercial. 42% of the most vulnerable consumers have already been unable to complete a banking or payment task because an AI-powered tool failed them. For merchants, getting this wrong is reputational as well as operational. The reputational damage continues to erode trust with severe consequences for businesses.
Ecommpay’s research brings both sides of that problem together. “The payments ecosystem — from merchants to PSPs — needs to focus on nurturing consumer trust if it is to benefit from the commercial opportunities of agentic commerce,” says Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales at Ecommpay. “Currently some merchants are building agentic commerce into their own platforms where there is more control on the checkout experience. But the big question will come when merchants allow AI platforms to offer a checkout facility.”
The solution Ecommpay proposes hands responsibility to the middleman, “PSPs are the connective tissue,” says Blokker. He describes them as “perfectly placed to deliver the vital trust layer that will secure consumer confidence and empower merchants to succeed within agentic commerce.”
Payment service providers, sitting between merchants, consumers, banks and schemes, should be ready to handle identity proofing, transaction mandates, authentication, fraud prevention and dispute management.
Our involvement.
This is the first research of its kind to bring consumer and merchant perspectives together on agentic commerce, and to treat the trust gap as a structural and commercial problem as much as a technical one. Agentic commerce is arriving whether the industry is ready or not. Ecommpay offers solutions.
We were pleased to collaborate with Ecommpay and its other partner agencies on this white paper: translating complex fintech subject matter into authoritative thought leadership is core to what we do, and this collaboration is one example of that work in practice.
Read the white paper in full here.