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James Fry has spent over 13 years at Worldpay working with some of the world's largest merchants.
In that time, he's watched payments evolve from a back-office necessity into a function that sits at the heart of how enterprise businesses expand into new markets, grow and compete.
We sat down with him to understand what's driven that shift, what merchants are still getting wrong, and where the next wave of complexity is coming from.
Payments has moved from a back-office function to a strategic one
For most of payments' history, the decision about who processed your transactions sat with the finance department. It was a procurement call. You needed a payment provider the same way you needed a utilities supplier.
The industry has moved on from that. But there's a difference between knowing payments matters and actually building an organization around it. What James has seen, across hundreds of enterprise merchants, is that the ones getting the most out of their payments stack are the ones who've made it a function with real ownership.
"That means they have dedicated teams, clear KPIs, and a direct line to product and commercial decisions,” he says. “It's more than a seat at the table, it's a dedicated agenda."
In practice, that agenda looks specific. Which markets do we want to enter, and does our payments setup support that? What payment methods are our customers actually expecting? Are we optimizing for acceptance rates, cost, or both, and do we have the data to know the difference?
These aren't questions a finance team is well placed to answer. They require people who know payments deeply and have the authority to act on what they find.
But that transition isn't uniform. There are still merchants, even significant ones, where payments sit buried inside finance or IT, where the buying decision is made on contract terms rather than capability, and where optimization happens reactively, if at all.
"There is a risk that the gap is widening between those companies who are investing in payments and those who aren't," James says.
If that sounds like your organization, the starting point is simple: identify who owns payments, what they're measured on, and whether your current provider is bringing you opportunities or waiting to be asked.
Performance optimization isn't just for the largest merchants anymore
For a long time, sophisticated payment optimization was the preserve of the largest global merchants.
What's changed is how payment providers are packaging and distributing what they build. Capabilities developed for enterprise merchants are increasingly being made available to merchants of every size, without the overhead that once made them impractical.
"The more you can reduce the burden on companies and make payments as easy as possible, the more likely you can get the best performance for everyone," James says.
The result is that optimization is becoming closer to a baseline expectation than a competitive differentiator. If your payment provider isn't proactively bringing these opportunities to you, it's worth asking why.
Agentic commerce is coming. The industry is still deciding who controls it.
Agentic commerce is no longer theoretical. The premise, an AI agent acting on behalf of a consumer with the intent and permission to complete a transaction autonomously, is already taking shape. The consumer use cases are obvious. But the payments infrastructure to support them is still being built, and more importantly, still being contested.
"There are lots of different players that want to own the standard," James says. "You've got AI companies like OpenAI and Google who own the interface, and they're trying to define a standard. But then you also have the card networks coming out and defining standards as well."
That fragmentation is the real challenge for merchants, not the technology itself. And it's a problem the industry has faced before. James draws a direct parallel to the early days of 3D Secure where multiple overlapping frameworks existed that led to slightly different implementations despite them all driving toward the same underlying goal.
Eventually the industry converged. The question with agentic commerce is how long that takes, and what it costs merchants in the meantime.
The trust problem compounds it further. Payments has spent years building frameworks to stop bad bots. Agentic commerce introduces a category of trusted bots that need to be let through, which requires new ways of verifying agent identity, establishing shopper intent, and ensuring fraud engines can tell the difference.
"There's been years spent trying to stop bad bots online from defrauding companies. Now we've got this notion of trusted agents, which are essentially bots at the end of the day. How do you build that and make it a channel that works?"
The bottom line
Payments are getting more complex. The merchants who treat that complexity as something to actively manage, rather than something to hand off entirely, are the ones pulling ahead.
That means building the right internal function, demanding more from your payment partners, and staying close to the trends that are reshaping how commerce works.
We covered all of this and more with James in the latest episode of Payments Unfiltered. Listen to the full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
