Stablecoins are no longer a side project for crypto-native companies, they’re turning into serious payment rails for global business. I sit down with Anna Kratky Strebl, CEO of Confirmo Group, to unpack what stablecoin payments look like when you move past hype and start solving real problems: accepting funds from customers worldwide, sending mass payouts to contractors and traders, and reducing the mess of maintaining countless local payment methods.

Anna shares her path from working in international trade for the British government to helping grow Confirmo from a small Bitcoin-focused product into a global stablecoin infrastructure provider. We talk candidly about what changed when stablecoins entered the stack: near-instant settlement, low fees, and far less volatility than Bitcoin, which unlocks product-market fit for digital platforms and even large e-commerce players. We also get into the uncomfortable truth that consumer checkout UX is still hard to beat, while stablecoin payouts are exploding because cross-border disbursements remain slow and expensive on traditional rails.

Regulation is a big part of the story. We cover why compliance is becoming a competitive edge, how Europe’s MiCA framework is reshaping vendors, and what transaction monitoring means on pseudo-anonymous blockchains. Then we look forward: agentic payments, AI in fintech, microtransactions, and why machine-to-machine commerce may force the payments industry to adopt programmable money faster than most teams expect.

If you’re building in payments, fintech, or global commerce, listen, subscribe, and share this with a teammate, then leave a review with your take: are stablecoins a feature or the next default?

Payments integrations have a reputation for being slow, fragile, and painfully dependent on specialists. We wanted to challenge that assumption, so we sat down with Casey Conley, Chief Product Officer at Payroc, to talk about a shift that’s quickly becoming impossible to ignore: agentic development and AI-driven developer experience for payments.

Casey explains what’s actually changing when developers can describe what they want in plain language and let AI agents handle the mechanical work of mapping specs, assembling an integration plan, provisioning sandbox access, and guiding testing. We dig into Payroc’s approach to “AI native, not AI only” and why that distinction matters when you’re dealing with regulated money movement, disputes, chargebacks, compliance requirements, and products like surcharging. Speed is real, but fast does not have to mean unsupervised.

We also get practical about how different software companies embed payments. Some ISVs want a light referral model, others want to own onboarding and the end-to-end checkout experience, and vertical SaaS teams often need flexibility across card-not-present, card-present, and wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Casey shares how Payroc designs for multiple paths and what the payoff looks like beyond engineering: faster time to revenue, better product differentiation, and fewer roadmap delays caused by payments complexity.

If you’re building embedded payments or modernizing your payments API strategy, listen through the end for how Casey thinks AI agents may become a second user and eventually the standard user in commerce.

Payments used to be the big unlock for vertical SaaS. Now it is the baseline, and the real question is what you build on top of it. I sit down with Sunil Sachdev, SVP and Head of Embedded Finance and Digital Assets at Fiserv, to get specific about how software platforms can expand from embedded payments into embedded banking, lending, and cash flow tools without losing focus or taking on unnecessary operational risk.

We talk through how to define embedded finance in a way that makes sense to operators: start with the customer’s pain point, then match the right product to the right moment in the workflow. That includes lines of credit that increase purchasing power, options that bridge payment gaps in industries like healthcare, and ways to deliver more value from the money already flowing through your platform. Along the way, we dig into the “point of need” concept and why even great products fail when they are surfaced at the wrong time.

Complexity is real, so we also cover the unglamorous parts: sponsor banks, KYC and KYB, compliance, fraud, settlement, and reconciliation. Sanil breaks down the tradeoffs between a processing-only approach and a full-service embedded finance model, and how to decide what your SaaS should own versus what a partner like Fiserv can handle. If you are planning your embedded finance strategy for the next two to five years, this conversation is a clear blueprint.