In the not-too-distant future, humans will leverage shopping agents to identify goods and services that meet their needs and preferences. Agent recommendations will include the lowest price and the highest rewards, among many other factors, such as review quality and delivery time. If a person doesn’t have the optimal payment method, the agent might present the pros and cons of new financial products and execute onboarding and transactions in real time.

The implications for financial institutions that facilitate payments or lending are massive, and the moats that long protected the industry are at an all-time low. For organizations to succeed, they must:

• Establish product strategies that prioritize “embedded” as a primary channel for interactions.
• Create a go-to-market and commercialization approach that aligns market needs with scalable architecture.
• Build teaming constructs that can deliver large numbers of integrations efficiently and at speed.

Success in Payments

Success in payments, historically and going forward, hinges on being available to consumers, accepted by businesses, and perceived as creating value for both. The first two tenets, “available” and “accepted,” are where the importance of embedded offerings has risen and will continue to rise.

Today, consumers must already have or be able to acquire payment capabilities the moment they’re shopping. Buy-now-pay-later and personal loans are examples of how non-financial and financial organizations have embedded offerings at the physical or digital point of sale.

In the future, shopping agents may abstract transactional experiences away from business or financial institutions’ properties (websites), leveraging connections to each that minimize friction and optimize results for the payer.

Optimizing results ties back to the third tenet of success in payments, “perceived value for both consumers and businesses,” which is where product strategy work must be reimagined.

Product Strategies

Payment product strategies revolve around a few important elements:

• Friction: How easy it is to enable and process transactions and refunds.
• Costs: How much it costs a consumer or business to transact.
• Value: Whether there’s a benefit for this transacting method that outweighs others.
• Control: What protections assure funds are rightfully and safely transferred.

Financial organizations must assess their current value propositions and how well each element continues to provide them with a competitive advantage in the era of AI-driven, embedded solutions.

Illustrative Example Control: Visa Intelligent Commerce for AI Agents focused on tokenization, authentication, and user intent.

Go-to-Market

A great product doesn’t guarantee commercial success.

Needs are only met when the first two tenets of success in payments are fulfilled: “availability” and “acceptance.” Embedding payment options that are seamlessly available to consumers and acceptable to businesses is challenging in the environment’s current state.

Financial institutions developed their products to be available first in physical environments and then on their own digital properties. Adapting the underlying technical capabilities to surface payment options via third-party digital properties has been challenging for these incumbents, but less so for embedded-native disruptors. What often results are many elongated integration efforts that yield bespoke, expensive, and unscalable solutions.

As established financial institutions seek to modernize their architecture to prioritize embedded as a key channel, careful planning must align the product strategy, target segments, and the degree to which the payment provider will offer off-the-shelf integrations versus configurable or customized ones.

In the near term, scaled businesses will hold leverage on the degree of customization a payment provider must deliver to meet their needs. However, as we look ahead to our agentic shopping scenario, we can envision a future in which the origination of payment methods and/or the gateways that facilitate payments are abstracted from individual businesses and standardized.

In this future, financial institutions with well-documented, service-oriented architectures and real-time data and event capabilities will find greater opportunities to maintain strong customer and merchant relationships.

Illustrative Example: Mastercard Agent Pay, a payment framework that allows verified AI shopping agents to make transactions autonomously.

Integration Teaming

Integrations today are overly bespoke. They often result in financial institutions dedicating costly capacity to both implementation and maintenance, which can’t scale to address the full addressable market.

To capture the current market and prepare for future opportunities, financial institutions must:

• Assess the foundational capabilities needed and dedicate capacity to modernization.
• Establish integration centers of excellence dedicated to understanding both customers’ and businesses’ evolving needs.
• Create integration pods capable of delivering the various flavors (customized, configured, or off the shelf) of integrations at scale.

At Method, we’ve developed assessments for evaluating financial institutions’ existing integration maturity that look at five dimensions:

• Openness & Accessibility
• Environments & Documentation
• API Quality & Ease of Use
• Community & Support
• Sales & Marketing

From this assessment, we help organizations identify a pragmatic, no-regrets roadmap that assists internal and external consumers of capabilities. Typically, we find it best for core product and capabilities teams to own these roadmaps, optimizing results for embedded and all other channels.

Integration centers of excellence can serve as “product owners” for embedded offerings, monitoring the unique needs of consumers and different stakeholders within business partners. Like product teams, COE teams must be composed of individuals who:

• Research and understand these needs.
• Partner with go-to-market teams that assess what businesses get from what integration packages.
• Prioritize which businesses hold the most value and what customizations or configurations are isolated (vs. configurations that need to be part of the overall offering).

These teams liaise closely with core product and capability teams, informing their near- and long-term priorities.

Integration pods develop experience in delivering a particular variety of integration and report into the center of excellence. Method leverages our nearshore and offshore resources to efficiently support client integrations at scale.

Large opportunities will warrant customization in the near term, and these integration pods will likely operate in 1:1 or 1:few modes with businesses, partnering closely with the overall product and capability team to ensure a scalable architecture.

Standard configuration and/or off-the-shelf teams operate in a 1:many model. Objectives for these teams should be set to minimize hands-on time by optimizing self-servicability. There’s an opportunity to explore AI-agent-driven efficiencies, as decisions in this space must be binary and have minimal variance.

Final Thoughts

Agentic commerce will rely on well-orchestrated embedded finance capabilities. For financial institutions to be successful, they must revisit their value propositions, align go-to-market strategies with scalable architecture, and build organizational models that treat integrations as both a product and a channel, delivering scaled implementations with efficiency.

To learn more about how Method is addressing embedded finance from strategy through delivery, contact us today.