At MPE 2026, Matteo Gamba, an Italian payment and fraud expert who has spent the last decade building teams and defining strategy to scale large e-commerce businesses up to $13 billion in volume, shared his key insights on agentic e-commerce Having focused his career on finding optimization opportunities through the lens of the fintech world, Gamba noted that the main topic of conversation at the event was agentic e-commerce.
Gamba explained that while there is still a lot of uncertainty about how agentic e-commerce will take shape, nobody wants to be left behind. Merchants are currently trying to figure out the right strategic setup. Their concerns aren’t just about avoiding being disintermediated by new technology, but about truly understanding how to deliver the best possible customer experience. This need for the right setup is particularly crucial given that the rapid adoption of AI agents has already raised security and governance questions in the industry, with reports of AI agents sometimes performing unintended actions.
What Gamba has seen succeed over the years is the strategic adoption of a payments infrastructure that minimizes complexity. This means finding ways to deal with multiple payment methods and PSPs efficiently, which in turn helps to both improve the top line and optimize the bottom line. This focus on core operational infrastructure is vital, especially considering that many high-volume businesses still rely on manual reconciliation processes, highlighting a major automation gap in the wider payments industry.
For this next phase of digital commerce, tokenization and digital identity are central pieces of the payment infrastructure needed to process agentic e-commerce. On a macro level in Europe, Gamba noted that conversations are increasing around the digital euro and competing solutions like stablecoins.
Stablecoins are finally seeing greater adoption, moving past a decade of talk about crypto and blockchain. This is evident in market activity, such as gold-backed stablecoins being embedded into payments and rewards systems, signaling a shift toward real-world use cases for digital assets. Ultimately, the attendees at MPE are eager to be part of the action and are searching for partners who can provide the robust technology and infrastructure to support this new sales channel and user experience.
