Safety and soundness is paramount as the agentic commerce trend unfurls, and mobile wallet Paze is “ready to do pilots,” said Wally Mlynarski, CEO of the U.S. Bank subsidiary.

As banking and payments players grapple with the rise of artificial intelligence agents, Elavon CEO Wally Mlynarski points to two lessons that influence his agentic commerce considerations.

The first relates to fraud. Since the introduction of e-commerce, “we've been chasing and trying to stamp out fraud for 25 years, and we’ve made all the mistakes,” Mlynarski said of the industry.

That includes card verification value codes, Payment Card Industry data security standards and keyed entry transactions, all designed to manage risk, said Mlynarski, chief executive of U.S. Bank subsidiary Elavon, an Atlanta-based merchant payment services provider.

“We could go screw that up again with agentic commerce, or we can actually focus on safety and soundness,” Mlynarski said during an interview at last week’s Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas.

Big-bank CEOs such as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and PNC’s Bill Demchak have expressed liability concerns with AI agents acting on behalf of customers.

The second lesson relates to costs and benefits. The mobile wallet wars of the 2010s – featuring Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and, eventually, the big banks’ response, Paze – were about making the economics work, Mlynarski said. And that proved difficult.

“Entering agents into the flow of the consumer, the merchant, the acquirer, the issuing bank, and the networks, and now trying to add economics here to make this work, or take away economics from somebody in that chain, is going to be a challenge,” Mlynarski said.

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