As banking and payments players grapple with the rise of artificial intelligence agents, Elavon CEO Wally Mlynarski points to two lessons that influence his agentic commerce considerations.

The first relates to fraud. Since the introduction of e-commerce, “we've been chasing and trying to stamp out fraud for 25 years, and we’ve made all the mistakes,” Mlynarski said of the industry.

That includes card verification value codes, Payment Card Industry data security standards and keyed entry transactions, all designed to manage risk, said Mlynarski, chief executive of U.S. Bank subsidiary Elavon, an Atlanta-based merchant payment services provider.

“We could go screw that up again with agentic commerce, or we can actually focus on safety and soundness,” Mlynarski said during an interview at last week’s Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. 

Big-bank CEOs such as JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and PNC’s Bill Demchak have expressed liability concerns with AI agents acting on behalf of customers.

The second lesson relates to costs and benefits. The mobile wallet wars of the 2010s – featuring Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and, eventually, the big banks’ response, Paze – were about making the economics work, Mlynarski said. And that proved difficult. 

“Entering agents into the flow of the consumer, the merchant, the acquirer, the issuing bank, and the networks, and now trying to add economics here to make this work, or take away economics from somebody in that chain, is going to be a challenge,” Mlynarski said.  

To that end, he’s focused on understanding the value consumers are being offered, and prioritizing trust and safety and soundness, as agentic technology takes off while standards and protocols are being sorted out. 

Meta Platforms has added Stripe’s Link digital wallet to facilitate payments by its personal AI agent Muse; consumers have also started using Instinct and OpenAI’s dots. 

Such launches and pilots are “not necessarily thinking about all the safety and soundness in there,” Mlynarski said, contrasting those approaches with bank-driven efforts.

Mlynarski returned to Elavon this year after a stint at Bank of America, where he led merchant services and receivables. He said he helped shape Early Warning Services’ Paze mobile wallet, which can work within agentic commerce and address agent hallucination issues, among other things.

Paze is “ready to do pilots,” Mlynarski said. Early Warning Services is owned by seven large U.S. banks, including U.S. Bank. 

“We can create an ecosystem that does make this successful. And if we do that right and don't race into it too quickly, consumers will have a good experience. Merchants will have a good experience. Issuers will have a good experience. And then we'll see scale,” he said. 

“If we race into it and do it incorrectly,” he said, “consumers are going to be harmed.”

Mlynarski also sees his business as an accelerator for Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank’s deposits and lending growth. That includes enabling Elavon’s merchant customers to offer buy now, pay later, and providing capital for small-business clients’ liquidity needs. 

“If you think about how we position and work with our clients to bring in deposits to the bank – obviously, to keep those deposits, we have to do the full cycle,” he said. “We have to be able to do the payments portion of that, on the back end. … But if I can solve the front-end receivables side and bring in the mass volume of our retail clients or our lodging, airlines, etc., I can actually bring in deposits.” 

Weaving U.S. Bank’s capabilities and services into what Elavon offers its merchant customers is an ongoing pursuit, he indicated. 

As U.S. Bank chases growth in the small-business segment, bundling services can help the lender stand out as it seeks scale, CFO John Stern said this month. 

“More and more, my business is moving into software,” Mlynarski said. 

Clients’ point-of-sale and enterprise resource planning systems are their “lifeblood,” so “the more we can embed the bank into those solutions, we can bring lending to them when they need it, we can bring a receivables solution or other things that they might need to manage the business,” he said.

Increasingly, that includes security solutions, enabling small businesses with antivirus software, he noted. 

“We are the game of connections,” he said. “We drive all those connections together to simplify that, to package that, so the business doesn’t have to go solve that.”