At MPE 2026, Marco Conte from IXOPAY highlighted how merchants can successfully navigate todays complex payment landscape and prepare for the massive shift toward Agentic Commerce and AI. Conte joined IXOPAY following the 2025 acquisition of the data and payments intelligence company he founded, Congrify. With 13 years of experience spanning operations, strategy, and data roles, he is a true expert in the field.
Conte explains that payments are inherently complex, a challenge merchants face through what he calls the complexity curve. As a business grows from a local e-commerce entity to a global player, it must integrate multiple payment service providers (PSPs) for different regions, along with various risk and compliance solutions. This complexity forces merchants to adopt a multi-PSP strategy, leading to the pivotal question: do you build your own in-house solution, or do you buy a third-party service?
IXOPAY offers a compelling answer by providing orchestration solutions like tokenization and payment orchestration gateways. Beyond the core functions, the company offers Payments Intelligence products that fundamentally help businesses, regardless of size, understand their payment data. Conte notes that even companies who build their own internal orchestration still face serious complexities around monitoring fees, authorization rates, and risk. IXOPAY steps in with data science tools like anomaly detection and recommendation engines, giving merchants the insights they need to stay on top of their data.
Looking ahead, the top priority for the industry is preparing for Agentic Commerce and the continued rise of AI. Conte believes this future is less a question of ‘if’ and more a question of ‘when’ and ‘how.’ Since there is already a multitude of approaches and protocols emerging, this actually puts payment orchestrators like IXOPAY in a great position to simplify the overall complexity for merchants. From an internal perspective, Conte’s goal for this year is to enhance the use of AI within payments, focusing on practical applications such as anomaly detection, financial forecasting, and simulations, which allow AI agents to manage and optimize data and settings for merchants.
Conte praises MPE 2026 as an invaluable gathering, calling it one of the best places in Europe to meet merchants and have meaningful conversations. The conference’s value, he explains, comes from its size, which fosters honest, detailed discussions about the current challenges and priorities of the industry. This environment allows Conte to have hundreds of powerful interactions over a few days, providing the critical touchpoints needed to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving payments sector.
