Nexi and ReFiBuy Partner to Launch Agentic Commerce Optimization for European Merchants

Nexi and ReFiBuy have entered a partnership to deploy Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO) across Europe, addressing a shift where consumers use AI agents to research and purchase products. For fintech professionals, this represents a critical move toward integrating payment infrastructure with the AI-driven product discovery layer to maintain merchant competitiveness.

What was announced

The collaboration between Nexi, the European PayTech, and ReFiBuy, an ACO platform, focuses on helping merchants optimize their product catalogues for AI shopping assistants. This initiative is backed by data from Nexi’s forthcoming survey of approximately 28,000 consumers across eleven countries, which found that more than half of respondents have used AI to assist in searching, finding, and buying products online within the last month. This confirms that Agentic Commerce is already changing the fundamental ways consumers interact with digital storefronts.

The partnership aims to solve a specific challenge in the emerging commerce landscape: AI agents can only recommend products they can accurately interpret. By utilizing ReFiBuy’s specialized expertise, Nexi’s merchants can improve the data quality of their catalogues, ensuring they are visible and accurately evaluated by AI agents during the discovery phase. This shifts the focus of digital optimization from traditional search engines to the product catalogue itself.

Nexi, which serves millions of merchants in over 25 countries, is currently running several pilot programs. These pilots allow consumers to identify products, add them to carts, and complete payments using domestic or international methods through an integrated infrastructure. The rollout will begin with merchant education, market guidance, and direct engagement to help retailers transition to models optimized for autonomous AI agents. This work builds upon Nexi’s existing efforts with Google Cloud and other industry partners to create secure, interoperable payment systems for this new era of commerce.

"Together with our partners, we are laying the groundwork for secure, scalable agent-driven payments and we’re supporting merchants to prepare for the incoming Agentic Commerce revolution. Even though Agentic Commerce is at an early-stage, consumers across Europe are already relying heavily on agents to guide them in their online shopping, shortlisting alternatives and getting recommendations. By engaging with partners like ReFiBuy we will enable our customers to improve their product visibility online to stay competitive in the emerging world of Agentic Commerce,"

Roberto Catanzaro, Chief Business Officer - Merchant Solutions at Nexi Group.

The companies involved

Nexi is a major player in the European payment technology sector, providing digital payment services to millions of merchants and thousands of financial institutions. Operating in more than 25 countries, the company has positioned itself as a central pillar of European payment infrastructure. Nexi has a history of forming strategic alliances to modernize payment systems, including technical collaborations with Google Cloud to enhance its cloud-native payment capabilities. The company’s reach across diverse European markets makes it a primary gateway for new commerce technologies entering the continent. FF News has followed the company's development extensively, with 83 previous reports covering its various market moves and technological integrations.

ReFiBuy is a specialized platform focused on Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO). It provides the tools necessary for merchants to ensure their product data is structured in a way that AI shopping agents can easily ingest and evaluate. Led by CEO and Co-founder Scot Wingo, the company addresses the "discovery layer" of the shopping journey. While ReFiBuy is a newer entrant to the broader fintech conversation, its partnership with Nexi provides it with immediate access to a massive merchant base across Europe, scaling its ACO solutions to a market-wide level.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed Nexi’s expansion and its role in integrating new payment standards across the European continent. Recently, the publication covered how dm Integrates Wero E-Commerce Payments via Nexi and European Payments Initiative, highlighting Nexi’s involvement in the rollout of the Wero digital wallet in Germany. Additionally, the company’s efforts to modernize public infrastructure were noted when JCB and Nexi Partner to Enable Contactless Transit Payments Across Campania Public Transport. These stories reflect Nexi’s broader strategy of embedding payment technology into both retail and public services, a trend that continues with its latest move into AI-driven commerce optimization.

What this means

This announcement signals a fundamental shift in the e-commerce power dynamic. For years, merchants focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to capture human attention; now, they must pivot to Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO) to capture AI attention. As AI agents become the primary interface for product discovery, the traditional "storefront" becomes less important than the underlying data structure of the product catalogue. This puts immense pressure on legacy retailers who lack the technical agility to reformat their data. The industry is moving toward a model where payments are no longer a standalone checkout event but are deeply integrated into an autonomous, agent-led discovery and execution loop.