Wildfire Report Reveals 95% of Consumers Distrust AI Platforms for Payment Processing

Wildfire Systems has released its 2026 Consumer Rewards & Behavioral Shopping Trends report, highlighting a significant "payment trust gap" in agentic commerce. While U.S. consumers are rapidly adopting AI for product discovery and price comparison, they remain deeply hesitant to delegate actual transactions to autonomous agents, presenting a critical hurdle for fintechs aiming to automate the checkout experience.

What was announced

The report, titled “Agentic Commerce’s Wallet Problem,” is based on a survey of 1,007 U.S. consumers and explores the friction between AI adoption and transactional trust. The data reveals that while 71% of U.S. consumers now use AI chatbots—a sharp increase from 22% two years ago—only 5% would trust an AI platform itself to process an agent’s payment. Furthermore, 41% of respondents stated they would trust none of the payment options tested for autonomous purchases.

The findings suggest that agentic commerce is currently limited by the perceived risk of the transaction. While 29% of consumers are "very comfortable" letting an AI agent handle a purchase under $20, that figure drops to just 6% for items costing $500 or more. Routine purchases like toiletries and household basics (23%) are more likely to be delegated than high-stakes bookings like airfare or hotels (17%). This consumer hesitation mirrors recent industry shifts; in March, OpenAI moved its shopping strategy away from its "Instant Checkout" model toward product discovery, citing a need for greater merchant flexibility.

Economic pressure is a primary driver for AI adoption, with 56% of users interested in AI for finding deals, a figure that rises to 78% for households with children under 13. To bridge the trust gap, 38% of consumers indicated that carrying loyalty rewards through to an AI purchase would increase their comfort level, while 36% cited cashback. These financial incentives ranked higher than an AI platform’s money-back guarantee (29%) or fraud protection (27%).

The companies involved

Wildfire Systems is a loyalty and consumer insights platform that provides white-label solutions for financial institutions, rewards programs, and publishers. The company focuses on driving merchant sales and consumer engagement through integrated shopping experiences and cashback rewards. Its platform is designed to embed commerce and loyalty features directly into the digital environments where consumers spend their time, such as browsers and mobile applications.

The company operates in a competitive landscape where the intersection of fintech and artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving. By providing tools that allow businesses to offer rewards and shopping portals, Wildfire positions itself as a bridge between traditional e-commerce and the emerging field of agentic commerce. The firm’s focus on white-label portals suggests a strategy centered on enabling third-party brands to maintain customer loyalty in an increasingly fragmented digital marketplace. As the industry shifts toward AI-driven discovery, Wildfire’s role involves helping partners navigate the transition from manual search to automated shopping assistants while maintaining the financial incentives, such as cashback and loyalty points, that drive consumer behavior.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed Wildfire Systems’ expansion of its loyalty infrastructure over the past year. In April 2025, the publication reported on how Wildfire Systems Supercharges Loyalty Program Growth with Action Rewards, a move aimed at diversifying how consumers earn rewards beyond traditional cashback transactions. This followed the company’s earlier launch of a Hosted White-Label Shopping Portal in March 2025. That development was designed to allow financial institutions and other organizations to deploy fully branded shopping experiences with minimal technical overhead, reinforcing Wildfire’s position as a key infrastructure provider for the next generation of digital commerce and consumer rewards programs.

What this means

The "trust gap" identified in this report suggests that the fintech industry’s rush toward fully autonomous AI agents may be hitting a psychological ceiling. While consumers are happy to let AI do the "legwork" of price comparison, the actual movement of capital remains a protected human action. For banks and digital wallets, this represents a defensive opportunity; banks are currently the most-trusted entity to process these payments at 17%, ahead of digital wallets and retailers. The immediate future of agentic commerce will likely not be fully autonomous, but rather a hybrid model where AI handles discovery while traditional financial intermediaries provide the security layer required to finalize the spend.