At MPE 2026, Anurag Chitlangia, Senior Product Manager at Uber, gave a candid look into the massive challenges and opportunities facing global merchants when it comes to payments. Based in Amsterdam, Chitlangia’s work centers on ensuring smooth, interoperable payment integrations between Uber and various third-party platforms like ChatGPT or Instacart. For the user, this means they can seamlessly transact across different digital experiences without friction.
For a global giant like Uber, the toughest puzzle is how to build a scalable payments platform and its highlighted that the goal is to operate across many geographies and still offer a perfect user experience; all while avoiding the build-up of incremental operational expenses in the back office. The scale is huge as Uber operates in over 80 markets and deals with 80+ different kinds of payment methods. This deep, global exposure is Chitlangia’s secret weapon, allowing his team to “cross-pollinate” lessons and ideas from one market to bring it to another. This approach helps Uber speed up its go-to-market strategy and significantly reduce mistakes when expanding into a new region.
Looking ahead, Uber is particularly excited about the move to agentic payments, where AI agents handle transactions autonomously, a shift of which presents interesting questions for merchants around how to build trust, manage the chain of responses, and securely store data when an agent is making decisions. Solving trust in this new payments ecosystem is the key challenge facing the industry. Chitlangia concluded by noting that the payments ecosystem is massive and he’s looking forward to seeing the innovations other merchants and companies are bringing to the table.