Registration and networking

Keynote (25 mins) – Changing the narrative: Transforming payments into a revenue driver

For centuries, money came in three forms: cash, central bank money, and commercial bank money. A fourth is now maturing, digitally native, programmable, and borderless by design. Stablecoins aren’t just another crypto asset; they are evolving into regulated payment instruments with real-world rails, enabling faster, cheaper, and global payments.

Regulatory momentum is now aligning with innovation. In the UK, FCA CP25/14 & CP25/15 and Bank of England guidance are creating a clear path for stablecoins as money-like instruments. In the US, AML/CFT obligations under the PATRIOT Act and BSA provide a compliance framework for on-chain payments. Europe’s MiCA regime authorises e-money and asset-referenced tokens across the EU, while Asia’s MAS, HKMA, and JFSA are establishing payments-first licensing, reserve, and redemption standards.

Market leaders are already taking action. PayPal’s PYUSD, J.P. Morgan’s JPM Coin, Ripple’s USD stablecoin, and pilots from Mastercard and Visa show how stablecoins are moving into consumer, merchant, and institutional payments.

The takeaway is clear: stablecoins are no longer theoretical—they are live, regulated, and reshaping payment rails. The question for banks, fintechs, and payment providers is whether they will shape the future of money—or ride it built by others.

(Moderator) Riccardo Tordera, Director of Policy and Government Relations, The Payments Association

Matthew Long, Director, Payments & Digital Assets, Financial Conduct Authority

Cassie Craddock, Vice President and Managing Director, UK and Europe, Ripple

Headline Keynote (25 mins) – To be announced

Keynote Panel (40 mins) – The payments price tag: Let’s talk about fees

• Interchange, network and schemes, acquiring, processing and transaction – managing fees is the number one challenge listed by merchants again and again. Do you understand what you’re paying and why?
• How should merchants approach negotiation and cost reduction with partners and providers? How can businesses manage, control and reduce the impact of fees?
• Where is the wider industry headed? Is the current regulation fit for purpose? How can we as an industry drive better transparency, fairness and competition?

Morning networking break (25 mins)

Spotlight on (25 mins) – Payment’s USB-C moment: unified data for an agentic future

• Fragmented payments data across card acquiring (POS, HPP, direct, plugins) A2A and local rails creates friction, risk and missed opportunities for merchants and businesses. With AI agents reshaping finance, unified data is essential. Standardised interfaces like the Model Context Protocol will enable real-time insights, automation and agentic payments, turning data into a product.
• Identify the pain points caused by fragmented payment data across cards, A2A and local rails, from costly reconciliations to incomplete fraud signals and missed insights
• Can a unified data and standard interface support efficient risk and compliance decisions? What role could AI agents play in automated routing?
• How treating payments data as a product powers agentic innovations, from real-time fraud prevention and self-optimising payment flows to merchant-facing analytics that surface trends before human teams spot them. 

Panel (45 mins) – Fraud, trust, and the bottom line: Matching smarter detection with seamless experience

• What are the leading detection and analysis tools for understanding the fraud patterns in your business model. Where are the weak points? What are other merchants doing to combat them?
• Explore best practice for balancing appropriate friction and chargebacks and refund abuse management with a seamless customer experience.
• How will the new VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program) scoring work? How could it affect your business?
• How can merchants use better customer insight to build trust and rebuild a social contract that encourages fair use and discourages fraud.

Lunch (60 mins)

Panel (45 mins) – The cost of failure: How to build resilient, seamless systems

• How much is payment failure for legitimate customers actually costing you? Explore strategies for identifying the points of failure in your system and tools to mitigate them.
• How to build in resilience into your payments structures via tools like tokenisation and retries etc. How could tokenisation make payments more seamless and secure?
• How do we balance the checkout experience against other requirements e.g. security vs one-click checkout.
• Strategies for collaborating with the rest of the business to embed best practice across the board.

Beyond the buzz (25 mins) – Stablecoins for merchants: Upgrading the modern treasury stack

• How do traditional rails hold back merchants today? How are stablecoins directly improving these pain points?

Break (30 mins)

Spotlight on (25 mins) – Profitable or just popular?: Managing payment choice

• The list of possible payment methods keeps growing – which ones are worth investing in for your business?
• The power of choice is now in consumer hands – in what circumstances and what customer profile would someone choose BNPL or Pay by Bank or digital wallet?
• How do you turn a payment choice option into a growth lever? How do you show ROI on new payment methods and demonstrate value internally?
• Has your payment process considered different elements of inclusivity?

Panel (45 mins) – Why is open banking still not working for merchants? What next?

• What are the working use cases for merchant adoption of open banking? Why is uptake still low among some verticals?
• Where is open banking working? What is different about those use cases?
• Has regulation so far done enough to make the benefits open banking appealing to merchants and customers? What needs to be done to accelerate adoption?
• How could adopting open banking be rolled in with other developing opportunities – e.g. wallets, embedded finance
• What can we learn from the upcoming VRP pilot?

Panel (45 mins) – Accountability, responsibility and Agentic AI: The future of automated decision making?

• ‘Agentic’ is the new kind of AI touted as the next big tool everyone should invest in, but what successful use case examples are there? Is this just the next hype?
• What could be the potential for streamlining operations and supporting decision making processes? What about customer service support?
• What risks are there in entrusting decision making to AI? What checks and balances need to be in place? Where should accountability and responsibility lie?

End of Day 1