The Two Disruptions Reshaping Payments and Why the Next Million Users Won't Be Humans

Two disruptions at once

Arthur Bedel says two major disruptions are under way: a change in the rails payments run on, and the adoption of AI. In his view payments "was actually built for card present," and that has to evolve. He expects that "soon we're gonna have more agents present than actually humans."

Looking to 2040, Bedel predicts everything will be hyper personalized, with agents purchasing and moving money for people. He expects all rails to become interoperable, agents to have something like their own banking super app, and trading to become agents competing against agents. He also argues payments is already a commodity and should be priced on the value it enables, not per transaction.

Data as the asset

Bedel points to YouR AI, which he says is building digital twins that can perform everyday tasks, and argues that data itself will become a currency for training models. "Data is gonna be queen," he says.

Lessons from Peru

Bedel says Peru is building a local rail modeled on UPI and Pix, with officials studying the Indian system. He notes that in India banks lost ownership of the consumer to PhonePe and Google Pay. Peru's two main wallets already have 18,000,000 customers, he says, and he warned banks they could become Blockbuster if they don't build super apps. He describes three forces: UPI-style rails, then Open Finance, then agentic commerce on top. He also wants global regulations by 2040 so agentic commerce can scale.

New media push

Arthur Bedel has launched PayUp, a daily video series that takes one payments news item each day across LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, and hired a head of marketing for it. He recommends following Marcel Van Oost, who he says has 300,000 followers on LinkedIn.