--- title: Agentic Commerce Tops the Agenda as Merchant Payments Conference MPE Turns Twenty description: MPE has published every agenda since 2008 ahead of its 20th edition, with agentic commerce and PSD3 on the 2027 programme in Berlin, 9 to 11 March. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-09-18T10:05:00.281Z updated: 2026-09-18T16:53:45.474Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/mpe-2027-agentic-commerce-berlin image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/MPE_day1_128-scaled.jpg categories: FinTech, Networking content_type: Spotlight region: Berlin publication: Sovereign Magazine about: - type: Event name: MPE 2027 description: MPE (Merchant Payments Ecosystem) is Europe's leading merchant payments conference. MPE 2027 is the 20th edition, held in Berlin from 9 to 11 March 2027 at the InterContinental hotel. The conference brings together merchants, acquirers, payment service providers, fintechs, banks and regulators to work through card acquiring, open banking, embedded finance, payment orchestration, agentic commerce and regulatory change including PSD3. The 2026 edition drew more than 1,600 attendees, over 500 of them merchants. MPE 2027 is expected to host 170+ speakers and 100+ sponsors across three days of keynotes, workshops, the Innovation Hub startup competition and networking. url: https://www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com/event-registration/ startDate: 2027-03-09T08:00:00.000Z endDate: 2027-03-11T17:00:00.000Z sameAs: - https://www.facebook.com/people/Merchant-Payments-Ecosystem/100064873053611/ - https://x.com/mpecosystem - https://www.linkedin.com/company/merchant-payments-ecosystem/ - https://www.instagram.com/merchant.payments.ecosystem/ - https://www.threads.com/@merchant_payments_ecosystem - https://www.youtube.com/@EmpiriaGroup --- MPE's 2011 programme included a session titled "Leather was so 90's - the mobile wallet is here and will stay". Apple Pay launched in October 2014, more than three years later. That session is one entry in the History Hub, an archive of every MPE agenda since 2008 that the organisers have published ahead of the conference's twentieth edition. MPE, the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference run by Empiria Events of Bratislava, takes place from 9 to 11 March 2027 at the InterContinental Berlin. A 56-second film covering the same twenty years has been released alongside the archive. Agentic commerce is the subject the organisers have chosen for 2027, meaning purchases in which an AI agent acts for the customer from the search through to the payment. ## Five Eras in MPE's Twenty-Year Agenda Archive > "In 2008, the question was: Can Europe build one payments market? Today, it is: Who owns the checkout when an AI agent acts on the customer's behalf?" > — Natalia Ivanis, chief marketing officer and managing partner, MPE MPE has sorted twenty years of agendas into five eras, each one the question merchants and payment companies were putting to each other at the time. From 2008 to 2011 it was whether Europe could create a single payments market; from 2012 to 2015, whether the phone would replace the wallet; from 2016 to 2019, who owned the customer; from 2020 to 2023, how to stay resilient; and from 2024 to 2027, who owns the checkout. The first conference was held in Brussels in 2008 and 189 delegates attended. Across twenty editions the organisers count more than 15,000 people from over 70 countries. The 2016 to 2019 agendas were dominated by card schemes, wallet providers and platforms competing for the direct relationship with the shopper. The same companies are still competing for it, and it still comes down to [whether shoppers trust the name handling their money](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/paypal-competitors-trust-problem). The 2020 to 2023 question, how to stay resilient, was put while European retailers were moving volume online at speed and judging their payment providers on uptime and on the share of transactions that went through at the first attempt. Cost and acceptance rates stayed on the agenda after the emergency passed. ## Agentic Payments and the Checkout An agentic purchase involves software that holds or is delegated the customer's payment credentials, searches for a product, selects one and pays for it without the customer ever loading the merchant's checkout page. Merchants face three questions they have not had to answer before: who carries the liability when the buyer is not a person, how [a legitimate agent is told apart from a fraudulent one](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-agent-birth-certificates-doug-cossa-identity), and whether their product data is accurate enough for a machine to choose from. The card networks are building rails for agent-initiated payments, though [shoppers so far use AI to choose what to buy more readily than to pay for it](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/visa-ai-shopping-agentic-payments-not-yet). Vendors are already selling infrastructure for the third of those, among them an AI shopping engine that has released [an ontology layer meant to make product data readable by buying agents](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/onton-ontology-1-trust-agentic-commerce), on the argument that catalogue data written for human shoppers will not survive contact with software comparing thousands of listings at once. A payment started by an agent arrives at the network as a card-not-present transaction, without the device, browser and behavioural signals that risk engines normally score. The fraud models merchant acquiring banks run were not designed for a buyer with no phone and no shopping history of its own, or for [software that does exactly what it was asked and breaks the system doing it](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-agent-gym-booking-hack-alignment), and payment orchestration vendors sitting between the merchant and the acquirer work from the same data. Merchants whose customers never load a checkout page also lose what that page does for them. Upsells, loyalty prompts and the behavioural data a checkout collects all assume the customer is inside the merchant's own environment. The agent protocols published so far keep the merchant as the merchant of record and let it set which products and prices an agent can see, and some support linking the customer's account to the agent so loyalty and saved cards carry across. Without that link the merchant receives the order and little else. ## Mobile Wallets, Stablecoins and the Timing Problem The phone has not replaced the wallet, and the mobile wallet that reached scale arrived in October 2014 rather than in 2011. Physical cards are still issued and still used. "The timing was early. The question was not," Ivanis says. Bitcoin, another subject from the archive, never became an everyday way to pay in a shop. The question behind it has returned as stablecoins, and [European businesses can now accept them through mainstream payment infrastructure](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/stripe-stablecoin-payments-europe-usdc-dune). Germany and Italy have proposed [an EU mechanism that could block foreign stablecoins](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/eu-stablecoin-kill-switch-germany-italy-proposal). PSD2 forced banks to give licensed third parties access to accounts, and control moved from the bank's own app to whoever held the customer relationship. The organisers treat that as a pattern rather than an exception: each time European rules have opened a market, the party holding the customer interface has gained control. Agents are now taking that position at the checkout. ## PSD3 and Strong Customer Authentication > "Security that stops the sale does not work." > — Natalia Ivanis, MPE Ivanis means strong customer authentication, which became mandatory for online card payments in Europe from 2019. Fraud rates fell, and merchants also lost orders from customers who could not complete the extra step. MPE's organisers expect agents to put the same rules under the same strain. PSD3 and the payment services regulation that accompanies it are still moving through the EU legislative process, and both will revise the authentication rules. Neither text was drafted with agentic checkout in mind. An agent cannot produce a fingerprint or open a banking app to approve a push notification, so either the rules are rewritten for delegated authority or the authentication step moves to the moment the customer sets the agent up. ## The MPE Berlin 2027 Programme The March 2026 edition in Berlin drew more than 1,600 attendees, over 500 of them merchants. MPE puts the 2027 numbers at more than 170 speakers and over 100 sponsors across the three days. Acquiring economics, fraud, orchestration and the European regulatory timetable have appeared in some form in every edition since Brussels, and all twenty years of them can now be read in one place in the History Hub. Registration for MPE 2027 is open, and the 30 per cent early bird rate closes on 23 September. A pass is €2,695 instead of €3,850, excluding VAT. Prices and terms are on the [MPE 2027 registration page](https://www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com/event-registration/). ### Event: MPE 2027 9 March 2027 – 11 March 2027 In-person Venue: InterContinental Berlin, Berlin, Germany Organized by: Merchant Payment Ecosystem MPE (Merchant Payments Ecosystem) is Europe's leading merchant payments conference. MPE 2027 is the 20th edition, held in Berlin from 9 to 11 March 2027 at the InterContinental hotel. The conference brings together merchants, acquirers, payment service providers, fintechs, banks and regulators to work through card acquiring, open banking, embedded finance, payment orchestration, agentic commerce and regulatory change including PSD3. The 2026 edition drew more than 1,600 attendees, over 500 of them merchants. MPE 2027 is expected to host 170+ speakers and 100+ sponsors across three days of keynotes, workshops, the Innovation Hub startup competition and networking. [Event website](https://www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com/event-registration/) ## FAQ **Q: What is agentic commerce?** Agentic commerce is buying and selling in which software acts for the shopper. The agent searches, compares, selects and completes the purchase, so the customer never works through the merchant's own checkout. MPE's organisers date the current era of the industry from 2024 and frame it around who controls the checkout once the buyer is a machine. **Q: What does agentic payment mean?** An agentic payment is the transaction leg of that purchase, where the agent holds or is delegated the customer's payment credentials and initiates the payment itself. For the merchant and the acquirer it arrives without the device, browser and behavioural signals that normally support a card-not-present authorisation, which is why liability and agent identification are unresolved. **Q: What is PSD3 regulation?** PSD3 is the proposed third EU payment services directive, published with a companion payment services regulation, which would replace the PSD2 framework in force since 2018. It covers authentication, fraud liability, open banking access and the licensing of payment firms. It is still in the EU legislative process and was drafted before agent-initiated purchases became a commercial question. **Q: What is SCA strong customer authentication?** Strong customer authentication is the PSD2 requirement that an electronic payment is approved using two of three factors: something the customer knows, something the customer has and something the customer is. It applied to online card payments in Europe from 2019 and cut fraud, at the cost of checkout failures and abandoned baskets while merchants and banks adjusted to it. **About Merchant Payment Ecosystem** MPE is Europe's largest conference and exhibition dedicated to innovation in merchant payments. [Website](https://www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com/)