What About Crypto and AI?
Crypto — The Eternal Rollercoaster
Few topics create more noise in payments than crypto. It promises faster, cheaper, and more open financial rails — yet for most merchants, it still lives somewhere between curiosity and cautious experimentation. And let's be honest: we all love the thrill of holding, we all love the dip, and we all panic when it dips again. Crypto's story has always been one of volatility masquerading as stability, before tumbling back into volatility.
The irony? Probably 99 % of those loudly preaching about crypto are also the ones who know just as little about AI — both hyped beyond recognition, both searching for consistent, real-world purpose. Crypto, however, isn't a single thing. It can mean digital currencies, blockchain-based settlements, or stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies. In payments, the real question isn't philosophical — it's practical: can crypto actually make moving money faster, safer, or cheaper for merchants?
Acceptance is the most visible use case. Some payment providers allow consumers to pay in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum while merchants still receive their local currency. The provider handles conversion instantly, insulating the merchant from volatility, custody, and regulatory risk. It sounds futuristic — and occasionally makes headlines — but adoption has remained extremely limited. The issues are predictable: low customer demand, exchange-rate spreads, refund complexity, and tax and AML implications that outweigh the benefits. For most retailers, crypto acceptance remains more of a marketing signal than a business advantage.
A good example came from Galaxus and Digitec, Switzerland's largest online retailers. They introduced crypto payments in 2019, allowing purchases under CHF 200. By late 2023, the option was quietly removed. Their reasoning was simple: demand was minimal, and the operational effort disproportionate. Their public statement summed it up well — they'd be back with a new solution once the time is right. It's a perfect snapshot of where crypto stands in mainstream commerce today: interesting, innovative, but not essential.
Despite years of hype, crypto remains a niche in payment processing. Cards, wallets, and local methods still dominate day-to-day commerce, and the infrastructure around stablecoin settlements hasn't reached mass adoption. For now, crypto's role in payments is less a revolution and more an experiment — a promising idea waiting for the right mix of regulation, usability, and genuine demand to make it worth the effort.
AI — From Buzzword to Backbone
If crypto's journey is a rollercoaster, AI is the weather system above it — everywhere, unpredictable, and shaping everything beneath. Every company claims to use it; few actually do. But unlike crypto, AI has already proven indispensable to payments — not because it replaces people, but because it amplifies them.
The real power of AI lies in enablement. Modern payment providers are shifting from automation for efficiency to intelligence for exploration. AI isn't just about cutting costs; it's about giving teams — and merchants — superpowers. Merchants can now explore their own payment data conversationally: asking natural-language questions like "Why did chargebacks spike last week?" instead of waiting days for a BI report. It's a quiet revolution: AI as a co-pilot for financial insight. Providers that open these analytical capabilities to merchants create real differentiation — empowering non-technical users to understand and optimize their payment performance.
At the same time, AI is transforming fraud prevention and risk management. The sheer volume of transactional data — device fingerprints, behavioral patterns, spending histories — is far beyond human capacity. Machine learning models now detect anomalies in milliseconds, identifying fraud before it happens through pattern recognition, not static rules.
Stripe exemplifies this subtle integration. It doesn't sell AI as a product; it infuses it into everything — adaptive fraud detection, dynamic routing, and automatic dispute categorization. The result isn't a shiny chatbot but tangible outcomes: fewer false declines, better authorization rates, and smarter routing. AI, done right, becomes invisible infrastructure — always on, always optimizing.
But AI isn't just a tool — it's reshaping how commerce itself behaves. Welcome to Agentic Commerce, a world where intelligent systems act on behalf of both merchants and consumers. Imagine AI agents that negotiate best rates between PSPs, retry failed authorizations with smarter routing, or optimize settlement timing based on FX data — autonomously. For consumers, it might mean personal AI wallets that choose the cheapest or most rewarding payment method per purchase. Payments that think for themselves.
And within organizations, AI is becoming the creative collaborator — a partner that automates the repetitive, surfaces the insightful, and leaves humans to design, decide, and innovate.
