Agentic AI, Identity, Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Key Insightsfrom MRC San Diego 2025

Agentic AI, Identity, Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Key Insights from MRC San Diego 2025

MRC San Diego 2025 brought our member-only community together for three days of dialogue, learning, and collaboration. From 8–10 September at the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina, payments and fraud-prevention leaders gathered to exchange ideas, explore future-focused strategies, and strengthen connections in an intimate, solutions-driven environment.

Collaborative Learning: Workshops that Delivered

MRC San Diego began with a series of hands-on workshops that gave attendees space to dig deeper into complex topics. Payments 201, Fraud 201, and BIN-Anza! offered practical learning for professionals looking to sharpen their expertise—from transaction optimization and combating fraud to putting BIN data to better use. These sessions set the tone for the week, giving participants strategies they could apply right away.

Among these, the most talked-about session was Agentic AI in Action: How AI Agents Are Reshaping Visibility, Revenue & Fraud. This three-hour workshop moved the conversation beyond theory to show how AI-driven agents are already influencing consumer workflows, distorting traffic metrics, and creating new vectors for abuse. Through real-world examples and collaborative discussion, participants explored both the risks and the opportunities—and what merchants must do now to prepare.

Key takeaways included:

• New visibility gap: AI agents are distorting top-of-funnel metrics, with merchants reporting double-digit drops in human pageviews as agents do the browsing. Implement monitoring on non-payment pages to capture the real picture of traffic.
• Rethink controls beyond CAPTCHAs: Many agents navigate sign-ups, pass simple CAPTCHAs, and ignore robots.txt. Treat agents like any user segment—score intent, not just automation.
• Identity and authorization must evolve: Expect models where agents assert identity (e.g., signed keys) and present tokenized payment credentials—raising fresh questions for verification and fraud prevention.
• Don’t share customer credentials with agents: ATO risk will rise when consumers hand logins to third-party agents. Build clear policies, agent-aware authentication, and anomaly detection around delegated access.
• Real business impact (and opportunity): Agentic flows can enable real-time price discovery, negotiation, and new revenue models—but only if merchants can detect, govern, and prioritize legitimate agent intent.
• Detection must be adaptive and collaborative: Shift from rule-heavy approaches to AI-assisted detection and shared intelligence. Classify traffic by user legitimacy × automation legitimacy to decide when to allow, challenge, or block.

The session paired frameworks with live demos showing agents performing end-to-end shopping tasks—navigating sites, creating accounts, adding to cart, and working around simple blocks. The takeaway was clear: agent traffic is no longer theoretical—it’s already here. Merchants must design visibility, policies, and controls that allow trusted agent flows while stopping abuse before it ever reaches checkout.

From workshops to the main stage, the conversations kept building in scope. Our two keynote sessions brought big-picture perspectives on the forces shaping the future of payments and fraud prevention.

Keynote Highlights

Stablecoins & the Future of eCommerce: From Hype to Real-World Impact

Lindsay Lehr Tutson, Managing Director at Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence, delivered a keynote presented by Arcot by Broadcom that brought stablecoins into focus for merchants. She outlined how stablecoins combine the programmability of crypto with the stability of fiat, and what that balance could mean for the payments ecosystem.

The discussion examined potential benefits such as faster settlement, lower costs, and greater cross-border efficiency, alongside the challenges of adoption, operational readiness, and fraud-prevention concerns. Attendees left with a practical framework to evaluate whether—and when—stablecoins might play a role in their payments strategies.

The Fraudster’s Playground: How Identity Verification Gaps Fuel eCommerce Crime

In a keynote presented by Chargeblast, for powering an exceptional week—and to every speaker and attendee who brought their best thinking to the table. We’re excited to keep building on this momentum at upcoming MRC events as we continue advancing payments and fraud prevention—together.