Money20/20 Vegas 2026: Checkout.com's Rory O’Neill on agentic commerce and US expansion

Quick Summary

The landscape of commerce is splitting into two distinct phases: discovery and execution. Rory O’Neill of Checkout.com explains at Money20/20 Vegas 2026 how agentic commerce is already impacting merchant traffic and why building a robust trust model is the next hurdle for autonomous payments.

How is AI changing the way consumers discover products?

Discovery through AI and Large Language Models is already widespread. Many merchants are seeing website traffic decrease significantly as consumers use agentic discovery tools to find products rather than visiting sites directly. To adapt, retailers are focusing on the essentials of e-commerce, including:

• Optimising product catalogues and pricing information for AI tools.
• Ensuring SKU availability is exposed to LLMs.
• Preparing for a shift where the initial marketing happens further up the chain to an agent rather than a human.

What are the barriers to fully autonomous agentic payments?

While discovery is evolving quickly, the payment side requires more development. Rory O’Neill notes that the trust system and infrastructure are not yet in place to support agentic payments at a great scale, particularly in Europe. Consumers will likely outsource the tasks they do not want to do to agents, but they will only do so once a reliable trust model is established. Interestingly, this shift provides merchants with a level of insight and data on purchase intent that has never been available before, allowing brands to tap into exactly what consumers care about.

What is the strategy for Checkout.com in the United States?

Although Checkout.com is headquartered in London, the company is aggressively targeting the US as the world's largest payment market. Having secured a US licence, the firm is focusing on offering greater commercial flexibility and improved payment performance. Rory O’Neill highlights that major brands such as Uber, eBay, Spotify, Pinterest, and Samsung already use their infrastructure. The goal is to put merchants in more control of their processing and close the gap between online and in-person payment performance.

How does data sharing impact payment performance?

Payments have always relied on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to route transactions across networks. The next stage of growth will come from how data is shared across an increasingly complex ecosystem. By sharing data more effectively across multiple models, the industry can achieve greater acceptance rates and drive up overall payment performance. Rory O’Neill suggests that being profitable allows Checkout.com to continue investing in these new services and technologies to solve merchant problems.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Checkout.com is positioning itself as a vital bridge between traditional processing and the data-heavy future of agentic commerce. By focusing on the US market and the nuances of AI discovery, they are addressing the reality that merchants must now sell to both humans and the agents that represent them. Their emphasis on ecosystem-wide data sharing suggests a move towards a more interconnected, high-performance financial infrastructure where AI is not just a tool for fraud detection, but the primary driver of the consumer journey.