The Payments Leaders’ Summit (PLS), held at The Landmark Hotel in London, brought together senior professionals from the retail, fashion, online travel agents, telecom operators, energy suppliers and financial services sectors for two days of strategic networking, learning, and discussion. With a packed agenda and strong attendance from leading merchants, the event delivered high-value engagement for those driving payment strategy and fintech innovation.

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The events’ sponsors from leading Payment Service Providers facilitated dozens of one-on-one meetings, offering practical insights and solutions to individual merchants and industry leaders. In the main conference hall, thought-provoking panels and presentations tackled critical topics at the forefront of the payments landscape, including agentic commerce, commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRPs), the UK’s National Payment Vision, one-click checkout, BNPL, payment orchestration, stablecoins, and the future of cross-border payments. Even Open Banking got a mention. However, agentic commerce was top of mind during the breakout discussions and coffee breaks.

Merchant roundtables also proved to be a vibrant hub for dialogue, debate, and peer-led discovery. Marchant participants exchanged lessons learned and shared emerging trends from the rapidly changing payments and fintech environment, helping both established and challenger brands stay ahead in a competitive marketplace. A small selection of merchants was already receiving requests from AI agents and around 60% to 70% of merchants, who had expressed an opinion, are expecting to receive traffic from AI agents within the next 12 months. OTAs at the event said they were already developing proactive strategies to prepare for the potential to be disintermediated and are expecting agentic commerce would be leveraging their own inventory of hotels, flights and other travel related products to re-purposed and sold to consumers via AI agents. This is an interesting development that Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) will continue to stay very close to and help support our clients to prepare for this eventuality.

Across all the sessions, the importance of collaboration between merchants, payment providers, and technology leaders was a consistent theme. As payments infrastructure, consumer expectations, new payment solutions come to market, and regulations continue to evolve, events like the Payments Leaders’ Summit offer a vital platform for merchants to engage with new ideas, socialise payment strategies, and shape the future direction of the UK’s own payments industry. Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) is Knowledge Partner of the PLS – is you need more information please contact EDC.

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