Everyone is talking about Agentic Payments! So I sat down with Robert Kraal, Co-Founder of Silverflow, live at Money20/20 Asia and we had a chat. Robert brings a commercial perspective to the conversation, and we focus on the what are the hard commercial questions the industry still needs to answer before agentic payments can truly scale.

We cover:

(00:00) Is the card system ready for agents?

(01:00) The commercial model nobody is talking about

(02:30) Neutral agent vs. paid agent: the Spotify analogy

(04:00) What happens when your agent talks to another agent?

(06:00) Liability: who's responsible when the agent gets it wrong?

(08:00) The tokenization gap in emerging markets

(10:00) Where to start: simple use cases first

(12:00) What Silverflow is doing to prepare for agentic transactions

(14:00) What excites Robert most about this space

(16:00) What payment professionals should be doing right now

👉 Connect with Robert:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkraal/

Website: https://www.silverflow.com/

👉 Connect with Monica

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicamillares/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@moni_millares

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@moni_millares

Website: https://www.purposedrivenfintech.com/

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Disclaimer: This episode does not constitute professional nor financial advice and does not represent the opinion nor views of my current, past or future employers. The guest has agreed to record and release our conversation for the use of this podcast and promotion in social media.

Silverflow. Robert Kraal

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How do you make a transaction between two agents and what happens if something goes wrong? So who's liable for that? How do I know that that agent does not refer me to fraud transactions for instance?

Monica: you guys wrote a blog post recently that it was like the card system was built for humans.

Robert: Yeah.

Monica: Are we ready for agents?

Robert: In all fairness, I don't think that there are many companies ready, ready as, as you see in all the presentations. I mean, most of the things that are presented on these stages are sort of future visions.

But that's not the case as far as I'm aware.

Monica: Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's about of figuring it out, I think.

Robert: Yeah, I think so as well. And, and, and a number of the puzzle pieces, they've been quite crystallized. So that's good. Some of them have also been built and working testing, but there are also quite a few pieces of the puzzle that have not really been solved.

And I think that, those are the ones that also need to address. For instance, what is the commercial financial model behind somebody? Building an agent? Who's gonna pay for that will be me as a consumer, I pay. For agent request or sort of subscription for my agents to do certain things for me. Will it be the retailer where my agents buy something, but what do you do with retailers that are not connected to my agents?

So it's actually not my agent talking to different web shops to my agent, talking to different agents. And then you sort of have like, how do you make a transaction between two agents and what happens if something goes wrong? So who's liable for that? And then you have a third one, which has to do with fraud everywhere, where there are a lot of transactions involved.

There are other companies who try to omit fraud one way or the other. And it could also be with agents. I think that there might be people who say my personal agents, you can certify that if it's talking to other agents. How do I know that that agent does not refer me to fraud transactions, for instance?

Robert: Yeah. And of course you can certify certain agents, so probably my consumer, uh, agents might be certified and do certain thing, but if my agent starts communicating with other agents.

I lose a little bit of control there. My agent might lose a little bit control as well. And how many agents can you change behind each other? So I think that there, there, there's still those type pieces of the puzzle that's in my view still are things to discuss, but I think that the, the biggest one is sort of.

So also, who's gonna pay, how will the agent actually make money, and how neutral will it be? How neutral is the agent in reality? 'cause if I expect, if I give my agent instruction, try to find these shoes as cheap as possible, and it needs to be shipped in two days, great thing to send the agent talk to a lot of, uh, but how do I know that they actually really went through all the available stores that might be stores that closed off their site for agents that might be, stores that, uh, are simply on index for whatever reason, because they didn't pay or.

So how can we ensure that my agent actually does what I'm saying? So, and if I say, well, I only want to buy it if it's under a hundred dollars, will my agent come back with these shoes for 99 99 where it actually could have bought them for 95 somewhere and says, well, I had to deal for, for under hundreds.

So whatever is between them, uh, that we share with split. So that whole commercial model that is for me, it's in

Robert: Yeah.

Monica: You have Spotify free. Yeah. Or you have Spotify premium if you don't want all the ads. Yeah,

Robert: exactly.

Yeah.

Monica: So we'll have like agent premium, if you want.

Robert: Could be

Monica: certain.

Robert: But I'm not seeing that many, that these topics being discussed that much. What is the commercial model behind? Oh, we are. Yeah, now we are, and, and it's, I mean, I'm not, not like, I'm not the biggest agent, expert on the, on the, on the world, but I can ask questions for every.

Everyone who does something in payment, people, companies are not building debt for free. They're not giving away anything for free. So I think it's a fair question to sort of ask yourself, what is the commercial model behind the builder of this agent infrastructure layer Now? Well, they make their money and either it comes from me or it comes from retailer.

In my perspective, if it comes from a retailer, it's not neutral. If it comes for me, well, it could be neutral, but depends a bit on how much, how good the agent is.

Robert: I would expect that you want to see my agent save me, whatever, $50 last month, and I only paid $20 for it. So it was a good agent.

Monica: Plus the trust and security thought. I know that my agent has my best interest in mind and it doesn't have the interest of the brand that suddenly stuff.

Robert: Exactly. How do you know as a consumer,

Monica: I don't know.

That's a sort of challenge.

Yeah. If I buy it a separate transaction, so if my, the flight's separate myself, if I buy the hotel separate myself and dinner are separate myself and the flight doesn't go on. Yeah. What will the hotel say? That's not my problem. Yeah, maybe the flight will say, okay, indeed, we didn't fly you to wherever you had to go, so we have some sort of reversal, so we canceled the flight last minutes for whatever reason.

So you get your money back. But has nothing to do with it. They will say, yeah, uh, that's not my problem. You booked it, you reserved it, and you could cancel it until 36 hours in no funds. Yeah it's, it's four hours in funds because your flight was canceled. So you also get those type of things included.

Monica: Yeah. And I think it's like, yeah, all the exceptions scenarios they make or break the

Robert: well it needs to be too, because I think that that's of course, people, consumers, but also uh, the retailers or, or the banks that they need to build trust. This is something new. And with every innovation. Yeah, you want to make sure that that's, that's that it brings the trust that we all hope.

'cause that's the basic of the pain is we have trust in the system. So I think you should, should be careful or we as an industry should be careful to over promise and under deliver essentially. But particular on these things where it's gonna cost consumers money. If they say, well, I tried my agent and I said, okay, I want to.

Otherwise people lose confidence. And then it might become a gimmick for the next couple of years because nobody's really gonna use it and eventually probably move. Yeah.

Monica: Oh, that would be a shame.

Robert: Yeah, well, I mean this is with many innovations. I mean, there there are a lot of things that of course don't work perfect from day one and they need several iterations to make it workable for everybody in the ecosystem.

And this probably could be one as well, but this is quite new, so probably many people will not necessarily understand the impact. If I do a normal transaction with my cards, I sort of understand that now most people understand that what's happening, if you give your details to my agent, where people might get the concept, they don't really know what's happening underneath, and then things go wrong.

And then my answer would be, yeah, these are realistic edge cases, so maybe we should think about them first. Yeah.

Monica: And I think then the role of cons. In the industry becomes very important. Yeah. Because it's like within us as all the players in the industry, our people.

Robert: Yeah.

Monica: And then exactly the, from both sides issuing, acquiring consumers our chance.

Yeah. Big application.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. I think, and there's also the practical problem, of course, that. Most a agentic solutions. They work with some sort of tokenized cards and the different ways how you can tokenize cards. So let's go into that deal with, but if you look at, for instance in, in, in Thailand where we are now, but for many other countries in the region and in fact for many countries across the globe.

So there's also a gap between what we're talking here. Which is possible for very advanced payment providers because it's, they're, they're quite funds. They're very firm. But for many of the banks, for many of the acquirers in the market, for many of the payment source providers, and they don't even have the basics to start considering how to support it.

And that's, that's something else that. Yeah, it's great. We have this innovation, but it's, it's not reachable for many of the,

Monica: and then if we go back to the commercial side

Robert: Yep.

Robert: Yeah. I haven't read a McKinsey, uh, report but, but it's always good to put, put some sort of a number to it, because.

Uh, maybe you would like that book. So that is not en genetic in that sense, but you can make it's already, but it is within. The environment of this retailer, but it already touches a little bit because you have some agent that is searching apparently within this web shop, trying to make suggestions.

Well, the next step would be okay, then automatically order it. But I don't think many people automatically wants to have a new book shipped every month or every two weeks or whatever. So we've had that in the nineties in the physical form, these book clubs, and they don't exist anymore because people don't want to be attached to to subscriptions.

So, so there will be simple ones in, in, in sort of selected environments. But if you. Really tell your agent, say, listen, I want to book this holiday. I want to fly to, uh, uh, koi. I want to have a top tier hotel with a room view. I want to have dinner at, uh, four times a good dinner, preferably at, uh, Michelin star restaurants.

And by the way, I need to have a new swim gear and a new uh, bag. So if you make sort of a complex gentech payment, then a lot of things are going to happen at the same time. There are a lot of different retailers involved. And of course you expect that the agent makes the right decisions. Selects websites that are trustworthy, is looking for the best price, is looking for that.

It's delivered in time. It's looking for confirmation of reservation. These are the promises, but I think it's gonna take a while. It

Monica: take time

Monica: Yeah.

Robert: And the 30 trillion's great number and I'm, it's gonna dispute, uh, the research for that. But of course they take into account as well, very positive scenarios about what it could be.

Monica: Very good point. So if we bring it back to Silver Point.

Robert: Yeah. What

Monica: are you guys doing?

Robert: Well, I think of course we're a little bit on the, on, on, on, on the, on the backside.

So, uh, you have the bank who on the backside send these transactions to us, and you could argue that most of the tools that the bank needs from a ick point of view are between them and the merchants, them and the shopper. Uh, but of course, we are preparing our system. To work with these agent transactions.

You could think, should we build our own agent? But we have our internal discussions. If that would be for us, the smartest thing. True, or if we would partner with as many as possible because we expect that there will be multiple companies who will build those agents and we have a more neutral, but it could also be a combination that we will certain parts ourselves and also partner at the same time with others.

Monica: What excites you the most

Robert: about this parts?

Monica: About these parts? Yeah.

Robert: That's a good question. As you know, I've been in payments for quite a long time, and every one or two years there's a complete new eye. And some of them they come true. It's good and some of them are a little bit overrided.

I think this is one where we will eventually see a lot coming from, but I think that expectations of that actually working are a little bit too optimistic. I think it's gonna take a little bit more time. So what excites me the most about it is actually to create and look at those edge cases and try to see.

So for me, the exciting part is actually to look at those edge cases, see how we can. Great solutions for those ones so we can actually make it work.

Monica: So just to build on that, it seems let's say I'm at work, um, deep dive mode, my company, and seems like there's all these conversations happening.

But like the people working on the day to day, we don't have access. Those conversations other than the LinkedIn post. Sorry. Yep. So what should we, as the people working in the industry, not having those conversations, what should we start doing now to be part of Uh,

Eh, so some players they take a very broad role. Uh, and some players, they specialize on certain roles, and I think that, that if you specialize on a certain role, well, it's good to analyze how much impact will this have on my business. And in some cases it might not have too much impact. But if you're, for instance, fault and risk prevention tool or monitoring tool, this might have impact because the fraud patterns of agents.

Yeah. Will they commit fraud or not? You don't know. Uh, but it will be different than the fraud vendor of other people. Can you recognize whether a transaction actually is an Asian transaction versus not Asian transaction? There, there are lots of tools where you can do it, but it does have impact on companies, uh, focusing on fraud and resolution.

So I think for everybody, if you work in a company in payments do sort of an impact assessment. What does it mean? Uh, what do we need to do? How can we support it, and can we make a commercial difference there as well? Because most companies, of course, yeah, they're also want to make a little bit of money.

And if you are among the first movers of something. Unique, which is really needed in the markets. Then yeah, I have that creative thought and, and try to see where, where do you find your sponsor.

Monica: Amazing. It's been a great conversation.

Robert: Thank you so much, Monica,

Monica: Robert.