Sibos 2026: Temenos' Kaue Tozzi on Why Agentic Commerce Will Make Payment Volumes Skyrocket

Quick Summary

When instant payments arrived, the industry worried they would cannibalise ACH and wire volumes. Instead, all payment volume skyrocketed. Kaue Tozzi of Temenos, expects the same from agentic commerce: smaller, more frequent payments, a fundamentally different customer experience, and a big opportunity for banks that invest in the right foundations. Speaking at Sibos 2026, he explains where banks should and shouldn't spend, and why trust remains their core role.

What will agentic commerce do to payment volumes?

Tozzi expects an explosion in volume. Instant payments changed consumer behaviour, with payments getting smaller and more frequent, and agent-initiated payments will go the same way, scoped tightly to exactly what the agent is meant to do. That, he says, will create a lot of value for banks to capture and reshuffle the playing field for financial institutions around the world.

Which use cases will come first?

Small, predictable, low-risk ones. People are wary of handing decisions about their money to an agent, so the early use cases will be deterministic purchases with little ambiguity, such as:

• A daily coffee, like ordering a flat white
• Takeout for dinner
• Other low-value, low-risk transactions

More complex jobs, like planning trips and high-value purchases, will follow, "but it's not going to happen day one."

How will the customer experience and the role of the bank change?

Customers will often be unattended from transactions, but still tightly coupled to what they intended. If an agent sent to buy a blue dress finds a slightly different shade, the customer needs to be brought back in to approve it. The bank's role, however, stays the same: trust. Banks built vaults for physical goods and invested in cybersecurity for mobile and digital banking. Now, Tozzi says, they will invest in AI agent infrastructure that keeps their customers safe.

Where should banks invest to get ready?

Tozzi breaks AI agents into three parts: logic, context and tooling. Logic and reasoning are handled well by the frontier models, and competing there would cost a lot of capex. Banks should focus on the other two:

• Context: grounding agents in customer and institutional data, through data lakes and RAG-assisted tooling
• Tooling: APIs and event-driven architecture, because an agent that can't act or decide in real time isn't a powerful agent. Payments need to settle instantly and information needs to be retrieved immediately

With those foundations in place, banks can start targeting end-to-end use cases.

How does Temenos build trust into its AI?

AI products have to be explainable and auditable. Tozzi says everything Temenos delivers includes a clear chain-of-thought reasoning log showing what the agent did and why, and any answer about data in a bank's systems includes the SQL behind it, so users can see exactly where the information came from.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Tozzi's most pointed remark is a small one: he has already bought a coffee through an AI agent, and his bank didn't know about it. Agentic commerce is arriving with or without the banks. His prescription is sensible and achievable: leave reasoning to the frontier models and put the money into data and real-time rails. Banks that get that right can own the trust layer for agent payments. Those that don't risk watching the value slip to a competitor.