4 minutes
What we’re building next: a product update from Rethink Americas
An inside look at how our latest investments are improving approvals, expanding reach and simplifying operations for enterprise merchants.
James Fry
Executive Lead – Head of Enterprise Product
James Fry is an enterprise payments leader with 15+ years’ experience driving product strategy, global expansion and delivery across cards, APMs and payouts, and advancing industry collaboration.
Key points
- New optimisation capabilities are lifting approval rates, reducing fraud and protecting margin at scale.
- Broader access to markets, payment methods and marketplace tools helps enterprise merchants grow without added complexity.
- AI, automation and streamlined integrations are making it faster and easier to onboard, manage and scale payments.
Worldpay, now Global Payments, recently brought clients and partners together for Rethink Americas, where we work through what matters most to merchants. Chief Product Officer Cindy Turner opened, and I followed with where our product work stands. Here’s the short version for merchants who couldn’t be in the room.
Cindy set the stage with some numbers worth considering: The newly combined Worldpay and Global Payments now move about $4 trillion across close to 100 billion transactions, in 175 markets, on roughly 100 payment methods – most of them not cards.
Her point wasn’t the scale itself. It was that a payment method only counts if it works in the consumer flow and on the back end, where you reconcile, get paid, dispute and refund.
That thread runs through everything we invest in, and it sorts into three areas: core payment performance, value-added services that drive growth and tech-enabled experiences. Here’s what we’ve delivered for our merchants across those themes.
Core payment performance
A declined transaction is a lost sale. A chargeback that sticks is margin out the door. Payment performance is a revenue problem – and we treat it that way.
The figures from work already in market make the case. Our optimisation programmes have delivered a 5.5% approval-rate uplift, Account Updater cases show a 9.3% average uplift, and our authentication work has cut fraud by about 10%. In 2025, we defended more than $750 million in disputes for enterprise clients – margin protection at scale.
'We now process domestically in around 80 markets through our own licenses and partners, with cross-border almost everywhere else.'
Two products do much of this lifting. Revenue Boost combines network tokenisation with intelligent retries to give each transaction its best chance of approval. Our authentication optimisation service extends 3DS, using data and machine learning to read whether an issuer responds well to it in non-mandated markets. We’re also sharing more fraud signals directly with issuers to cut false positives.
Reach matters as much as performance. We now process domestically in around 80 markets through our own licenses and partners, with cross-border almost everywhere else. Our work with the Visa Acceptance Platform opens access to roughly 100 markets for international and local debit. Card-present is live in 39 countries, and through partners such as FreedomPay and the Genius point-of-sale software we connect in-store and online across more of them. Mexico shows the payoff: over 80% acceptance and a target of about 6% market share by year-end, with ongoing success in Colombia and Thailand and deepened market expertise in Canada.
We’re also taking work off your plate in marketplaces, where more than half of retail now happens. A new proposition – live in EMEA, with the US to follow later this year – handles seller onboarding, KYC, split payments and reconciliation through a single Worldpay connection, so you can bring sellers on faster without carrying the compliance load yourself.
Value-added services that drive growth
The second area covers services that sit alongside payments but don’t have to come with them. They are deliberately agnostic, so you can use them with us or with another provider.
Credential management is the clearest example. You can vault global cards, local debit rails and agentic tokens in one place, with automatic updates so the details stay current. The data and tokens are yours to take with you. Paired with our vaulting service, you can route traffic to another stack and have credentials swapped on the fly, which lowers your PCI burden.
We’re also helping you put money to work faster. MCP+, our multi-currency pricing service, guarantees rates for up to seven days, supports regional FX windows, and lets you retrieve, lock and reconcile rates through an API. T+0 settlement gets funds to you sooner, and in Latin America our prepayment options bring Brazil’s 28-day and Argentina’s 14-day card settlement down to a day or two. Our market-leading payouts proposition is built for scale with straight-through payout processing at 98 to 99% today, with 99.5% the target for 2026.
'Our market-leading payouts proposition is built for scale with straight-through payout processing at 98 to 99% today, with 99.5% the target for 2026.'
On payment methods, recent and planned additions include Pay by Bank in the US (coming in Q3), OXXO Pay in Mexico, the Klarna network globally and on our US stack, Wero and stablecoin (both in flight) – with USDC settlement and cross-border payouts now supported. However your customers want to pay, the aim is to support it and to hold approval rates high across all of it.
One addition comes from the Global Payments side of the house: Como, a rewards and loyalty product that brings CRM, loyalty, marketing and communications into one turnkey offering. It works on its own or alongside your payment stack, and it was built with enterprise in mind.
Tech-enabled experiences
The third area is about applying AI to the experience of working with us, and to the channel taking shape next.
Agentic commerce is here, even if it doesn’t yet look the way many predicted a year ago. Oliver Whitfield from the Ravelin team, which Worldpay acquired in early 2025 and has since fully integrated, put it plainly: Agentic commerce has 'quickly become the most unpredictable area in the payments world.'
Platforms have stepped back from fully autonomous purchases toward agent-assisted buying, but the risk is already with us. As Oliver noted, fraudsters will adopt agents 'from the get-go,' while many of the signals fraud teams rely on – session data, device, IP address – grow less reliable or disappear.
That is the problem Ravelin, now powering fraud scoring in FraudSight, is built to handle. Our models can detect when an agent is present, identify which one, verify it is what it claims to be, and risk-score both the agent and the customer behind it. Even as the familiar fraud signals fade, the models adapt, so your exposure does not widen as agents enter the picture.
'Agentic commerce has quickly become the most unpredictable area in the payments world.'
Rather than build all of this alone, we’re working across the industry. With Visa and Cloudflare we’re developing a Trusted Agent Protocol to tell legitimate AI shoppers apart from bots; with Mastercard and Google we’re working on verifiable intent. That effort, led by Reshmi Suresh and Harsh Mehta, is part of why we’re already live with OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP. Because no single standard has won out, we’re building a universal adapter so you don’t have to choose among competing frameworks or carry the integration burden yourself.
The same thinking applies to the everyday work of doing business with us, which we’ve been candid isn’t always easy. We can now set up merchant IDs in minutes rather than weeks on our international acquiring platform. In 2025, we cut the first onboarding touchpoint in half, and we’re aiming to remove another two weeks by the end of 2026.
AI agents make setup quicker and easier so our teams can focus on optimisation and supporting merchants’ revenue growth. A new developer site offers self-serve sandboxes and instant credentials. And a recent proof of concept assembles a full integration pack – diagrams, code and SDK libraries – from a merchant’s stated markets and methods. On support, 90% of enterprise service queries are now triaged and routed by AI agents at 92% accuracy, cutting resolution time from four days to half a day.
Where this leaves us
None of this changes what you’ve trusted us for: core performance you can rely on, value-added services that contribute to growth, and operations that get simpler over time. That is the work ahead, and I’d welcome your input on where we take it next.
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