Ep. 11: What is payment orchestration? Kiel Cook of IXOPAY explains VAMP, processor lock-in and agentic commerce

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast. Today we're lucky enough to be joined by Kiel Cook, Principal Product Manager at IXOPAY.

Kiel, thank you so much for being here. Give us a little bit of an intro. Tell us more about yourself.

Thank you for having me. It is a marvellous Monday here at Money20/20 as we start this conference off.

A little bit about myself. As mentioned, Principal Product Manager at IXOPAY. I'm closing in on 20 years of experience in this payments industry. I've been across multiple different customers, multiple different interactions or different sides of the payments spectrum, from working in the merchant system to being on a payment provider system.

The ecosystem experience that I've been able to glean throughout my experience has positioned me to be here in this place and be ready to talk to you guys about the topics you have.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

So talk to me a little bit more about IXOPAY's vision and, more importantly for the listeners, what is orchestration?

All right. So orchestration is a bit of a buzzword. Depending on who you talk to, you might get a slightly different definition.

At IXOPAY, how we define orchestration is merchant empowerment. Giving merchants the ability to own their own data and send their data where they want it to be.

So we're looking at avoiding processor lock-in, giving you the ability to choose where you're going to process and when you're going to process with those providers.

Orchestration is all about payment connectivity, and we provide you the infrastructure for you to have that full-stack capability of connectivity across all of your provider connections.

Fantastic. Fantastic.

I know you and I have spoken before, Kiel, on VAMP. We're three weeks in now. Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Some people think the world's going to end due to it. What's your thoughts on VAMP so far?

Well, from a product perspective, the biggest thing that I've been doing is meeting with customers, having conversations, having dialogue, and what I've learned is we're still in a reactionary period where people are still trying to figure out exactly what this means.

Yes, it's been enforced as of October 1st, but fines and penalties haven't started to really trickle down the funnel just yet.

As I meet with customers, I'm seeing a dichotomy of experiences here. Depending on what your payment stack looks like and who you're processing with depends on how much you care about the change that VAMP brings.

Do you have a chargeback problem? Do you have processor lock-in? These are two of the questions that merchants have to answer.

Really, if both of those answers are yes, you do have a chargeback problem or you do have processor lock-in, then these are the situations where we're finding that VAMP is more impactful in a negative way to customers.

And what are your thoughts on the global versus local differences with VAMP coming into play now?

It's more about managing your payment stack. It looks different global versus local, domestic versus cross-border, but at the end of the day, it's all about: do you have a chargeback problem and are you able to pivot away from your processor if your processor has a VAMP problem?

Do we think there's been enough education by everyone in the ecosystem when it comes to helping the merchants?

I don't think there's enough education out there, but I think there's a learning curve.

If you are a high-risk merchant and you have constraints with your payments capacity, you're getting new MIDs on a consistent basis, you're having to exchange MIDs on a consistent basis, you're more trying to stay compliant because you have a challenge.

Those are the scenarios where VAMP is going to squeeze those merchants and those acquirers.

I say squeeze because my perspective of this is the goal of VAMP is a key in the cog of agentic commerce.

When I think of agentic commerce, I think of the consumer, their experience with their card, their willingness to allow someone else or something else to manage that card for them.

So how do we get in that psyche? How do we get the customers, the cardholders, to be open to those kinds of things?

To me, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to squeeze out the bad merchants.

It's too many bad merchants for Visa and Mastercard to go after each one of them, but you can kind of regulate this at the acquirer level.

So the quote-unquote bad acquirers who are allowing the high-risk merchants, who are basically masking their payments morality and doing it in a way that they're able to stay compliant by bending the rules, so to speak.

In my opinion, those guys' days are numbered, and that's happening intentionally to allow agentic commerce to have legs.

Because if cardholders are concerned about their card, if they don't trust the market, agentic commerce is going to be an even bigger hurdle for it to take off.

It's a really good point there when we talk about bad acquirers, and we see it all the time where there's different MCCs.

They're always being logged against merchants that we know are doing X, but they're being seen doing Y.

Visa, Mastercard go and do their work as they should be. They figure out what's happened. They do some mystery shopping and all of a sudden an acquirer gets a knock on the door to say, "What's going on?"

They then have to go to the merchant.

Some acquirers know what they're doing with this, right? This is why they're charging three, four, five per cent for domestic transactions on what should be a low-risk MCC.

So do you think there's enough collaboration between the schemes, the PSPs and the acquirers?

I would say there would be enough collaboration between the schemes and your full-stack providers, or schemes and your high-level, your poster child, your rock-star acquirers like your Stripes, your Worldpays, your Braintrees.

I feel like those guys have a good relationship, but if you have historical chargeback problems, fraud problems, I don't think your relationship's going to be that well with Visa and Mastercard as well.

I agree. I agree.

So, Kiel, what are your thoughts so far on Money20/20? How's it been for you?

Throughout the year of 2025, I've had a couple of different moments to speak on the payments ecosystem, to talk about payment connectivity and the different product offerings in the market.

So coming to Money20/20, I actually got here on day one yesterday and I sat in on a session. It caught me off guard.

It was talking about the future of payments. It was talking about the expansion of specifically buy now, pay later, and then it got into the topic of agentic commerce.

On stage, I feel as if Visa indirectly confirmed my suspicion all year that the VAMP things, the network token things, the actions that they're taking are not done in a silo.

These are not just random dots on the board. These are all dots with the intention of painting a picture, setting the table for agentic commerce to come about.

Absolutely. It's a really, really good point there.

I think Visa and Mastercard now are allowing merchants and PSPs to come to the table with their ideas and not necessarily dictating the future of payments.

Buy now, pay later is incredible when it comes to agentic commerce.

Someone was mentioning, if I as a consumer was using agentic commerce to purchase a product and I want to use interest-free credit or buy now, pay later, is the AI that's sitting behind it aware and going to educate me as a consumer what my APR is, how long it's going to take me to pay, what happens if I don't pay it in time, if I miss a payment?

As a consumer, do I believe and trust that the AI, machine learning, whatever it may be behind the retailer is going to really help me as a consumer understand what I'm buying?

Right. I would assume that would be equivalent to having fine print in our day-to-day.

As you go into a merchant's website and you purchase something, you want to have clarity on what it is that you're buying.

So how do they bridge that gap with agentic commerce? I'm waiting to see myself.

Absolutely fantastic.

And lastly, Kiel, the Shelf of Shame. What grinds your gears in the industry that we work in every single day?

In the payment space, one of the things that bothers me, or that grinds my gears as you say, as I travel the world, as I drive across the country and have moments with my kids, I run into a gas station or a local shop and I see all these random surcharges.

Ten-dollar minimum to just buy a pack of gum.

These are things that I feel like the card schemes need to find a way to enforce. It feels like stealing money from the local public.

Yeah, that's really good. I really like that because I think we looked at PSD2, for example, which was to come in and remove the ability to surcharge.

It was a revenue stream for merchants, right? And all we've done is created a new buzzword for it. It's a booking fee or something else that doesn't say the word service fee, but the intent is the exact same, which is to drive more revenue from unknowing consumers.

Right.

I think at some point rubber is going to have to meet the road for that because we want to become a cashless society, and having those abrasive moments where I get penalised for using my card, we're going to have to circumvent that in some way in order to get to that place that we want to be.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time and enjoy the rest of the show.

Absolutely. You guys as well. Thank you.