How Experian Is Making Agentic Commerce Trustworthy

AI agents can already shop, compare prices, and check out for you — but would you actually trust one with your credit card?

In this episode of This Month in Fintech host Sasha Pilch sits down with Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian, to explore the trust layer behind agentic commerce. From the shift from KYC to KYA (“Know Your Agent”) to Experian Agent Trust and digital identity tokens, they unpack how AI-driven payments could become safer for consumers, merchants, and the broader financial ecosystem.

They also dive into fraud prevention, open standards, Cloudflare, Visa, stablecoins, and what trustworthy agentic transactions could look like in the real world.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

This episode is sponsored by Granola. Try it free for 3 months at granola.ai/thisweekinfintech using code THISWEEKINFINTECH.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Kathleen Peters: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleenhpeters/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything aga

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Sasha Pilch 0:05

Hi, and welcome to the listeners of the This Month in Fintech podcast. My name is Sasha Pilch, and I'm really excited to interview our guest today, Kathleen Peters, the Chief Innovation Officer at Experian. So welcome, Kathleen. Thanks so much for doing this interview today.

Kathleen Peters 0:23

Thanks, Sasha. It's great to be with you.

Sasha Pilch 0:25

Great. So I'm really excited about what Experian is doing in terms of agentic transactions. It was very much the hottest topic at New York Fintech Week recently. But before we jump into that, I'd love to learn more about you. So you've had such an impressive career, and I love speaking with strong female leaders. It's one of the reasons that I co-founded NYC Fintech Women nine years ago. And I

Kathleen’s Engineering To Innovation Path

Sasha Pilch 0:54

would love to hear a little bit about your journey.

Kathleen Peters 0:58

Sure. Yes, I actually graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Missouri Science and Technology. And after graduation, I moved to Chicago to work for Motorola. And at that time, Motorola was building Iridium, which is a low Earth orbit satellite system to provide communication coverage around the world. And this was decades ago. And yet now we're all talking about Starlink. And so I think it's actually kind of exciting to think about having been on some of the frontier of developing these systems which would allow people to communicate wherever they were in the world. And we we think about Starlink today and go, oh yeah, of course, you know, that's going to work. But at the time we were trying to design and invent. We were coming up with things every day to try and figure out, particularly within the team that I was a member of, how do we build a handset, you know, a phone that was safe to hold next to your head, that had an antenna strong enough to talk to, not just an antenna or base station down the street, but a fast-moving satellite soaring over your head, thousands of miles above. And so it was really exciting introduction, I think, to being on that sort of bleeding edge of innovation. And that was something which became a hook for me, I believe, through my career. And from there, uh I left Motorola and gradually moved from more engineering type roles into more business related and product roles. Um, working for a number of startups, I moved to California. I still live in Silicon Valley. And then the last 13 years I've been with Experian and helping lead product, especially in the areas around identity and fraud. And most recently, how we're thinking about innovation used throughout the company, especially how we're using AI.

Sasha Pilch 2:56

Awesome. Um, I had no idea that you were working on the equivalent of Starlink back back then. And um, when I think of Motorola, I think of my hot pink flip phone that we had. I loved it. Yeah. Um, okay, cool. Well, now

Why Agentic Commerce Stalls On Trust

Sasha Pilch 3:15

I think like it's time to get into the hot topic. So we're all familiar with KYC, know your customer, and KYB, know your business. But now we need to implement the next generation, which is KYA, know your agent. And last week, Experian unveiled Experian Agent Trust. It's the first of its kind, a gentic AI e-commerce service. So it's exciting stuff. So please uh tell all the listeners about it.

Kathleen Peters 3:44

Yeah, it's really exciting time for us. And we've been obviously working with AI for years at Experian. Experian being a data and analytics and technology company is something that we have used in terms of machine learning and AI models for a long time. We couldn't help but be excited when generative AI came onto the scene and we thought about how we can use that internally? How can we build it into our products? Um, what's our place to play in the ecosystem? And of course, from generative AI, then there became the capability with agents. And so as we talked about and thought about how we were using agents within the business, we were also noticing a lot of announcements and new developments around how could agents be used to provide different convenience to consumers, to users like you and me. And obviously, agentic commerce is an area that's been talked about in the press, and there's been demonstrations and a lot of announcements for the last few months about agentic commerce, but it hasn't really taken off yet. Uh, there's been a number of announcements, there's been demonstrations, what I call happy path technology proofs that these technology technological pieces can connect together, but again, not big adoption. And what is holding that back? And as I and my team spoke with a number of the big players in industry, from the card networks to the CDNs to the merchants themselves, even talking to consumers, there was just a lack of trust. I like talking to people like, have you tried it? Have you actually tried buying something with an agent? If you have, it's probably still been a little bit of a clunky experience. Most people haven't. And what most people first tell me is, I don't trust that. Why would I trust giving an agent access to my bank account or to my credit card? And so we got to thinking, how can we play a part in this ecosystem? Agent trust is really the answer to that. So taking one of the things that Experian does best, and that is understanding consumers' identity, being able to verify that identity and provide that trust. What if we could digitize that, tokenize that, and bring that same trust to agents so that when agents are acting on our behalf, we understand who the human is behind that agent and what is their intent. So by working with an ecosystem of collaborators and partners, we decided to take what we do best and bring that trust to agentic commerce. And agentic commerce is really just the first use case where this applies. You can imagine we always will want to understand better who is the agent

Know Your Agent And Agent Trust

Kathleen Peters 6:40

behind uh who is the human behind the agent that's doing these tasks.

Sasha Pilch 6:45

Yeah, I think it's totally required. Like I haven't made a transaction using an agent yet because I'm scared. So I'm glad exactly Experian and others are really prioritizing this. In the the partnership with Experience offering Visa and Cloudflare and Skyfire and other retailers are involved. Can you talk a little bit about how this works with those other players in the ecosystem?

Kathleen Peters 7:17

Absolutely. So as I mentioned, there's been a number of protocols that have been announced to enable agenti commerce in particular, as well as just agents being able to speak to each other as well. We saw no need to reinvent uh what's going on there, but we are committed to open and transparent standards. So one of the organizations which we are a sponsoring member of is kyapay.org. And this is an open standard for KYA that can interoperate with some of these other closed ecosystems and still provide that intelligence and understanding about who that verified human is associated with the agent. And so because we weren't building a closed system ourselves, we're not reinventing the way that the card networks are going to talk to the vendors. We still came back to what will it take for consumers and businesses to trust? Like you said, you haven't used this, you're you're not, you're a little scared. The merchants are also worried. The retailers, they want to get this new opportunity around sales and business and consumers who want to try to use this space, but they're also concerned. How will they know that this is a legitimate consumer trying to purchase these items versus a bot attack or some other sort of um you know malicious intent or even just a scraper, right? They want to know who is actually behind that agent and why are they visiting the site. So we worked with these partners and we found that in order to build trust, especially in the near term, and taking the agentic commerce use case first, there are policies and regulations that have been in place for a long time where various ecosystem players understand who is responsible if something goes wrong. And so if there's fraud, if there's a mistake, if something needs to be returned, if there's a chargeback, all the parties in the chain understand what evidence needs to be presented, what role they play, and who ultimately will be on the hook for that. So that is how things work in e-commerce today and in real life. So, how do we bring that understanding, which is based on that mutual trust, to a gen e commerce? So many of those things come back to understanding who the human is. Was the human, did they have the KYC check, the know your customer check from the issuing bank when the credit card was issued? Did the merchant or the retailer do the appropriate fraud checks for that transaction before it went through? Um, I have certain responsibilities as a consumer. I understand those. If we can build that into an agentic flow, bring that human connection, then we should be able, especially in the near term, be able to leverage that existing

Partners And Open KYA Standards

Kathleen Peters 10:25

trust. We should be able to leverage those existing policies. And I think that's what's really going to help adoption at scale. That's what we heard from the ecosystem. That's what we heard from our collaborators and partners. And so we worked together to bring that to life.

Sasha Pilch 10:40

It's great that all of the players are coming together to figure this out. Um, can we talk through an example? So, like for example, I want to buy some new noise-canceling headphones. How would how would it work?

Kathleen Peters 10:56

So you would start in an environment where you're comfortable. And we have built this working code and we're we're demonstrating it to our partners. And um, what we have done is you can start in your favorite type of uh chat window where you may be using and creating an agent. So if it's the very first time that you are creating an agent for purchasing, it's going to ask you for some basic registration information. And at that point, Experian is going to be there at that onboarding at the time that agent is created to do the verification asking you for some information. It's going to do some form fill. And we're also going to do some fraud checks, which are in the background, and just risk assess at a high level and associate that with your agent. We're going to use technology from our partner Skyfire, who's going to create that KYA token again, using that open standard. And that token is going to serve as a digital passport for that agent as it now goes on and does what we've asked it to do. So in your chat window, just as you would search today, I'm looking for some noise-canceling headphones. Um, I want to spend less than $400. What should I do? And so now that agent has been created, it's going to go out and it's going to search for some options that meet that criteria. One of the first things that that agent is going to do is as it visits these websites of these retailers, the agent's going to knock on the door saying, I want to see what inventory you have to see if it's going to meet this need. In the past, a CDN or content data network like Cloudflare, like Akamai, would be looking at that traffic and saying, it's a bot, this is probably an attack. Block that traffic. And those companies have the technology there to protect those properties, to protect those retailers, to protect those businesses. So they would normally block that traffic because a bot meant something bad. But now a bot can be an agent who is actually working on consumers' behalf. So it's not enough to say, is this a human versus a bot? We need to know is this a good bot versus a bad bot. And so by noticing that digital passport, that KYA token that has been verified the identity by Experian, now that traffic can automatically pass through to the retailer site. Things operate as usual. And so there is merchandise that that agent can view. It will bring it back to the shopper, to you in your window and say, I've found these. Do you like any of these? Again, if this is the first time that you've been creating this agent, it will then ask for some payment information that you may have stored in a wallet or you may need to enter. Experience is going to validate that payment associated with that identity. Again, this all just happens in the background.

Headphones Demo From Chat To Checkout

Kathleen Peters 13:55

And then that provides a pay token that networks like Visa recognize. So Visa has their trusted agent protocol and Visa Intelligent Commerce, for example, which is purpose built to allow agents to transact and move through their normal typical payment rails. So again, getting back to this idea of how can we trust that agent traffic in a way that we're used to humans participating in e-commerce, that's what makes all this possible and is going to build that trust for scale. At that point, then you'll get a message and you're you're you can say yes, and those will be purchased and sent to you. So it will you'll have all that convenience, but you'll also know and you'll trust what will be there to protect you if something goes a little bit awry.

Sasha Pilch 14:42

Okay. So at the center of it, it's like the human is being bound to their agent, and the agent gets to do all the work, take it all off the human's plate, and then all the human has to do is approve it when it's like the time for purchase. Okay.

Kathleen Peters 15:00

Correct. Correct.

Sasha Pilch 15:01

Awesome. Easy and I will try that. That sounds safe.

Kathleen Peters 15:05

Yes, exactly. All that convenience. I think if we trust what can happen, you know, if it if something goes wrong, that's going to make a big difference. Um, and the merchant and the retailer are happy to trust that they understand who that human is. Uh the card networks trust that this is a validated card that's associated with this person. So it's just bringing that trust back into each piece of the equation.

Sasha Pilch 15:29

And it makes sense that Experian is leading the charge on this, um, considering all the fraud that you prevent already. So I've read that you've helped clients decrease fraud losses by 15 to 19 billion annually. So huge numbers there. And I'm really interested in these like protocols and like working together, all the players together. So you mentioned the KYA protocol. Are you involved in any other protocols? I've done some research on like X402 or AP2, anything like that?

Kathleen Peters 16:04

Yeah, first 402, of course, is for micropayments, and we're exploring that area right now and learning more about that. Our partner, Cloudflare, has been making some announcements in that area, which are exciting. So that I think is going to be a really interesting space. Our partner Skyfire supports not only the various types of card payments, but also stablecoin. And so, again, we didn't feel a need to reinvent these. We want to be able to leverage what has already been developed, what people are testing. That's why we built working code, a working capability here so that we could interact with and interoperate with these different standards. As the space evolves, there's going to be an evolution, I believe, in terms of what protocols will prevail. There are some closed ecosystems and shopping networks and other ones which are more open. We're going to see what consumers will accept, what retailers will accept. Again, this is all in the agentic commerce use case. We're going to see other use cases too for workforce identification of employees and agents doing things on our behalf inside our places of employment, inside those use cases. We also, given our experience, deep experience in financial services and fintech, we know there are going to be financial use cases as well. We're going to have agents doing things on our behalf. So we want to make sure that we are open and flexible and we are working with a number of the different protocols just to ensure that we continue to bring that value of a trusted human associated with the agent.

Sasha Pilch 17:44

Yeah. It's exciting. So many use cases are starting to unravel and making everything so much more efficient for us. So if the fraud angle is covered, then it makes it even more exciting because there's no like Absolutely.

Kathleen Peters 17:57

Absolutely. It brings back the trust.

Sasha Pilch 17:59

Yeah, exactly. Um, interesting that you mentioned stablecoin as well. It's definitely

Payments Rails Tokens And Stablecoins

Sasha Pilch 18:05

like the other hottest topic at New York Fintech Week the other week. Um, one of my clients' turnkey offers wallet infrastructure, and they have been doing really well with all the crypto native companies, obviously, but they're now making so much progress with the traditional fintechs and traditional banks and FIs. So um I'm very excited by how that is really evolving too. Um last week there was also an announcement by American Express, and they have an agentic commerce experience developer kit where the agent registers, the account is enabled, um, it has intent intelligence, which is something I keep hearing about. Like, was the intent of the agent warranted or malicious? Um, how does that American Express work integrate with Experian and Visa, et cetera?

Kathleen Peters 19:04

Yes. So Experience obviously worked with American Express for a long time, various aspects of our business. Um, it's been a great relationship between the businesses. Uh, with this announcement, we're excited to see this because American Express is recognizing some of the same challenges that we are. How can we build that trust? How can retailers know that this is a trusted agent? With the with American Express, they are unique compared to Visa and MasterCard in that American Express is both the issuer as well as the network. And so they already have a bigger piece which they manage and understand and control. And as a result, they can provide that layer of trust, which is owning and knowing that piece end to end. And then, of course, with that announcement, they have the additional assurance about uh ensuring that if there is a chargeback or something goes wrong, they're going to stand behind that. It's not dissimilar from how a lot of credit card transactions work in the US today on all of the networks. We understand when we are covered in case something goes wrong and who's on the hook. And I think they're amplifying and bringing that notion to agents as a way to, again, establish trust. So I applaud what they're doing there and I appreciate the openness of their developer kit so that we can interact and show the value that we bring to that as well. Uh we, as I mentioned, know American Express well. They trust Experian data, and we are excited to bring that same trust to ACE as well.

Sasha Pilch 20:48

Great. Um, we're nearly coming up on time. So before we move to the fun question, is there anything else that you want to talk about in terms of agentic payments that I haven't covered yet?

Kathleen Peters 21:02

I think we're living in a really interesting time right now. I feel privileged to be working in this space with so much change and so much uh technological promise. There's always opportunity that comes with that, and it's also risk. Having worked in identity verification and fraud,

American Express Approach To Agent Trust

Kathleen Peters 21:20

I'm always kind of looking around the corner of uh where this might be vulnerable as well. But the capabilities give us the tools to protect people as well. And I think that's a really important aspect. I think that is what builds trust. So I'm excited that Experian is able to do what we do best as a uh trusted caretaker, a regulated uh provider of these identity trust as well as fraud detection, and bring that to this new and exciting and emerging world of agentic commerce. So I think it's a really exciting time to be here and um. Perfect opportunity for us as well.

Sasha Pilch 22:02

Yeah, me too. I'm excited to start using agents to buy my holidays and trips and GCR. Yes. Um, okay, great. Well, we're nearly at time. So I'm gonna ask the question that I ask all guests because all of the guests are very impressive people and I want to learn from them, and I hope our listeners are able to learn from you as well. So the question is what are your favorite books? So we can do one personal, and it could be fiction or nonfiction, and one professional.

Kathleen Peters 22:40

So I love to read. I keep a number of books on my Kindle usually with me when I'm traveling as well. And I tend to lean toward biographies. I love people's stories, whether those are people from the Middle Ages or present day. I like it all. And so I always have probably a few biographies going for my personal reading. Uh, the one that I probably picked up most recently is a book called We the Women. It's by Nora O'Donnell, the journalist, and she is profiling a lot of the unsung and lesser-known women who have been instrumental in shaping our country. And I think with the 250th anniversary of the US coming up, it seemed timely. And I love hearing these stories and learning about seemingly ordinary day-to-day people, in this case, women who really made a difference and who we should celebrate today. So that's that's my latest biography that I'm reading.

Sasha Pilch 23:42

Oh, I'm so excited to read that. I um I'm not American, as you can tell from my Australian accent, but um I do love like learning about the history of America. And I remember there was like a docuseries or like a mini-series, the The Men Who Made America, which I loved watching, but I remember thinking, like, well, what about the women? And so I'm kind of excited.

Kathleen Peters 24:03

You were there. Exactly. Yeah, really. Yeah, but there's some great stories,

Risk Guardrails And Future Use Cases

Kathleen Peters 24:10

great stories. Um, you know, there was uh from enslaved women to um people who were delivering the messages to really important uh guiding principles um and maybe even behind the scenes. And so it's a lot of names that even we wouldn't have learned in the history books. Um very well researched by Nora O'Donnell. So that's a great one. If you see that, I would I recommend that one. Um on the professional side, um, a book that came out a few years ago that I really like, especially having worked a lot in product, is a book called Build. And this is by Tony Fidel. Tony worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple. He was instrumental in the creation of the iPod and several generations of iPhone. When he left Apple, he went on to found Nest, the smart thermostats that we see all around. And um, so a really innovative and cutting-edge type of approach to learning, making mistakes, trying again, and innovating. The reason I really like that book, and I often buy hard copy and I give it to people on my team or folks that I mentoring, is that you can take a look at the table of contents and look at the label of each chapter. And he even tells you in the foreword, feel free to jump around in this book. You don't need to read it in order. If there's a topic that is interesting to you, go read that chapter. It has probably a little bit of a biographical element to it. That's probably another reason I like it. But he'll do some storytelling of his own experience and um lessons learned, things that didn't work so well, what he took away from that, as well as what succeeded. So I find that it's a a great way to get a fresh perspective and um some best practice. That's great if you enjoy building new products.

Sasha Pilch 26:01

That's so helpful to be able to like just look for the topic that you need in that very moment.

Kathleen Peters 26:06

Yes. Yes.

Sasha Pilch 26:08

Are there any like favorite chapters or anything that you learned from that book that you implemented at Experian or in past roles where it was helpful?

Kathleen Peters 26:18

One of the themes that keeps coming out is that uh within the book, and he explains it in different ways too, is finding people with the right mindset on your team who are

Favorite Books And Closing

Kathleen Peters 26:30

comfortable enough with some ambiguity to try new things. And especially if you're building for a new space, I think agentic commerce is a great example of that. We don't know exactly how this is going to play out, it is evolving right now. And so there's a position where you can wait and see, and when this is settled, then we'll build really exciting, efficient capabilities. And then there's also a place for leaning into this, taking some risk, understanding, and maybe being part of that evolution. Um, I think there's a great place for both of those. And so, depending on where your company is at, where your project is at, find the right team that has the mindset that is either comfortable with that ambiguity or is all about optimizing later and put that together. Because if you're on that bleeding edge, it's not going to be as defined from day one. And you're going to have to experiment a bit more. And I liked reading in the book that uh it felt like we're giving a little permission to that kind of scenario, and that's one that I really like.

Sasha Pilch 27:38

Yeah, and it goes back to diversity as well. Like we need all types of mindsets. We need the people that are gonna optimize after everything's built, but then we also need those people that like are excited by ambiguity when some people would be terrified of it.

Kathleen Peters 27:55

So that's right. That's right, exactly. We need all of that. Um, we need those good guardrails when we're doing early design too. So I think that getting that balance right and having that mix of that point of view and that mix of experience is really valuable.

Sasha Pilch 28:12

Wonderful. All right, well, we're at time already. Um, it was love to it was lovely to chat with you, Kathleen. Thanks so much for explaining what's happening at Experian and your book recommendations were excellent. I can't wait to read both of them.

Kathleen Peters 28:26

Thank you, Sasha.

Sasha Pilch 28:27

Yeah.

Kathleen Peters 28:28

It was great. Great to speak with you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Sasha Pilch 28:31

Yeah, thank you. And thank you to all the listeners of the This Month in Fintech podcast. Um, you can listen to our podcast wherever you get your podcast. And if you could like and subscribe, then we would be really grateful for that. Great. Thanks, everyone. I'll see you next month.