Ep. 143 - AI and B2B Payments: Risk, Opportunity and What Actually Changes, with Pliant

Justin Hanna (0:05)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast, live here at Lisbon at Fintech Meetup Europe. With today, we are joined by Malte Rau, co-founder and CEO of Pliant. Malte, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit more about how you got into the industry and what Pliant do.

Malte Rau (0:19)

Sure. So yeah, I had the pretty standard introduction. So I started as a consultant, actually credit risk. And then as some consultant leaves for startups, I also left. And yeah, somehow I ended up now in sales as a CEO. I don't know how that happened. And yeah, we at Pliant, so we provide especially, I would say, card infrastructure to fintechs and banks.

Do this for 16 years now and our life across Europe, UK and the US.

Justin Hanna (0:46)

Amazing, and Pliant sit right in the infrastructure of B2B payments. When it regards to AI, how is that changing your world and the actual impact it has on Pliant as a business?

Malte Rau (0:58)

So I think generally speaking, there are two main drivers. So one, cards I think are an amazing payment tool or method for agents specifically because you can add additional guardrails. So I think there will be this second wave of adoption. More companies will be able to adapt to the full power of cards. And the second one is that infrastructure in general and payment becomes more relevant because a lot of the end customers directly want to connect to APIs and the like. And that, of course, is a strong suit of ours.

Justin Hanna (1:27)

Where do businesses go wrong with AI in payments?

Malte Rau (1:31)

I think one thing is right now following all the news and panicking, saying like, everybody's doing so much, we should as well. I think there's a lot of storytelling. It's still early days.

And it's not that the train is really leaving the station, in my opinion.

The second part is, I think, there's a lot of security risks or implications, and those are very real, and right now. So rather not follow the stories, rather make sure that there's not more cyber risks that are imminent for you, especially on payments, phishing, it's getting a little bit crazy.

Justin Hanna (2:04)

And what do you think is that direct impact to what we're seeing now, and maybe what we might see in three or four years?

Malte Rau (2:10)

Yeah, I think from our perspective, one direct impact are actually also in the fundraising environment. So when you look at VCs, so they're limiting more like what do I invest in? So you need also an AI story.

So that's a very imminent one for us. The other one is cyber security for sure. There's, it's like people, for example, doing podcasts, we get so many voice phishing emails, my employees with my voice because I'm doing this. And there's so much context that it becomes a little scary. So that's also something that we have to take a lot of focus and also invest a lot of money to be secure. And then the longer term, it's really, I think everything you see now in the news, the storytelling about agentic payments and these kinds of things, these are things that will materialize in three to four years rather than now.

Justin Hanna (2:57)

Do you think there is a direct correlation from an investor perspective around when they're looking at business to invest in, whether they use an AI or they're not using AI?

Malte Rau (3:06)

Yeah, I think like you have to do it. There's different, of course, levels, like do it for internal processes or for external ones.

I think there's a lot of like vacuum now that these AI native companies that have AI products are just growing so quickly. And I mean, we grow two X a year, which is good or used to be very good. Now people are like, hey, you're not tripling or six Xing. Yeah, that's, I think, something that we noticed.

Justin Hanna (3:34)

Where's that real risk in bringing AI into your payments infrastructure?

Malte Rau (3:39)

I think there's the one part where you really need to think about like new challenges when it comes to trust, right? Like if you think about giving a card to an agent, for example, you also have to take the perspective on the other side who might want to prevent that because there's also fraud attacks coming.

So that's something you have to think about like when dealing not with the networks like Visa where they also are going through these processes. So I think right now a lot of think tanks you have to join.