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The most important question for software companies building payments used to be whether they had the engineers, budget and time to do it themselves. Agentic artificial intelligence has already made that question obsolete.

“The question has changed from can we afford to build it, to, who’s responsible for when it breaks at 2 in the morning?” Paul Vienneau, chief technology officer at Payroc, told PYMNTS.

Cheaper code does not make payments simpler. It can expose everything that was previously bundled into the price of a payments partner: compliance, fraud controls, testing, operational resilience and, ultimately, accountability.

“It’s easy to go from concept to a working demo or build,” Vienneau said. “What’s more difficult is encapsulating the expertise and know-how, that tacit knowledge that developers and the business have.

“Agents are going to write the code, but they’re not accountable for it. Someone still has to sign their name,” he added.

For software companies, that essentially flips the old build-versus-buy debate inside out.

Payments historically presented software companies with a relatively straightforward economic trade-off. Building internally meant absorbing development costs and assembling specialized expertise. Buying meant surrendering some control in exchange for infrastructure, compliance capabilities and operational support.

“Build is almost now out of the picture, in the sense that there’s a lot less friction towards that particular outcome,” Vienneau said.

The implication is that companies evaluating payments partners today are buying something other than technology.

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