European PayTech, Nexi Group, supports retailers to drive growth through innovative, convenient and secure customer experiences. While the methods consumers use to make payments have evolved drastically, the checkout itself has remained largely static; until now. Retail Times caught up with Nexi’s head of strategy and transformation, Tommaso Jacopo Ulissi, to find out more
Q: How have payments and the checkout evolved over time?
A: Generation Alpha is the first cohort to grow up in a largely cashless society. Where grandparents once paid in schillings, francs or lira, fishing coins out of purses or pockets, today’s generation authenticate payments with a face scan, tapping mobile wallets to a terminal or making a single click online.
But while payment methods evolved, the checkout has remained largely static. In store, customers select their items and stand in line at the checkout, waiting to pay. Online, the process is similar: you search or browse items, add them to your basket, and then complete a checkout page to confirm your purchase.
In terms of customer experience, it’s familiar yet uninspiring. Trusted, yet impersonal. Functionable, but forgettable.
Retailers looking to differentiate themselves in today’s hyper-competitive markets have an opportunity to change this. But they must rethink their approach to the checkout. This means offering an experience that adds mutual value to both the business and its customers.
Three key trends are driving a transformation at the checkout innovation: cashierless commerce, unified commerce and agentic commerce.
Q: How do you define cashierless commerce? What does it look like to retailers and their customers?
A: Cashierless simply means freedom from a static, physical checkout at a specific location. It came about through a drive for accessibility. Let me take a step back to explain…
Across Europe, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have enjoyed steady growth over recent years, as consumers shopped locally with independent retailers. Historically, these MSMEs have relied on cash payments: it was convenient and easy to accept. However, cash use has declined and so MSMEs recognised they had to pivot to digital payments.
Until recently, many MSMEs considered digital payment acceptance to be out of reach, due to costs involved in acquiring and operating the right hardware. Today, however, software-based payment solutions have begun to emerge and scale, democratising the payment landscape.
I’ll give you an example: SoftPOS. SoftPOS enables retailers to transform their personal smartphone into a payment acceptance terminal, with no additional hardware required. In other words, a device they already own is transformed so that it can reliably and securely accept contactless and QR code-based payments.
For MSMEs, this offers an ultra-accessible, highly convenient and highly-secure payment acceptance solution. As you can imagine, it is easy to set up and operate, and relatively low cost compared to more traditional POS systems. For micro retailers – think gardeners, hairdressers, plumbers or house cleaners – this is a game changer, enabling them to accept digital payments, wherever their job may take them. This means you no longer have to awkwardly make bank transfers in doorways, set up rigid direct debits, or make promises to send payments later. It’s immediate: simple, fast and trusted payment.
Q: Is it only MSMEs that benefit from a cashierless offering?
Definitely not. Larger retailers – high-street stores and chains – can use SoftPOS to untether their staff from the checkout, if it’s right for them. This frees staff to accept payments where the customer is, so you can redeploy them to engage with shoppers throughout the store. Not only can this enable you to offer more personalised shopping experiences, it creates additional upsell opportunities. It can also remove barriers to sale by eliminating the need for consumers to queue at a static checkout – every square foot of your store becomes a checkout!
Q: The second trend you mentioned is unified commerce. Why is a unified commerce experience so attractive for retailers and consumers?
A: Unified commerce responds to multiple demands from retailers today. Costs have risen worldwide, forcing many retailers to streamline operations to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. This is particularly true for retailers with physical stores, were utility, rent and labour costs have soared.
At the same time, consumers have raised expectations for fast, personalised services. Value-added services, such as returns, loyalty programs and promotions, which were once differentiators, are now the norm. Retailers must therefore remain competitive and profitable by streamlining operations, while also enhancing the customer offer. It might sound difficult, but it isn’t an insurmountable challenge.
Many retailers today rely on a variety of different vendors to offer value-added services, and most of these services don’t integrate well with one another. What you end up with is a fragmented and inefficient system that fails to achieve its full potential. This is where unified commerce comes in.
Q: What does a unified commerce approach look like in practice at the checkout?
SmartPOS is one example of a unified commerce solution, transforming the checkout from a simple payment-acceptance station into a comprehensive business operations hub.
Retailers can manage multiple business operations from a single handheld terminal, including returns, loyalty programs, promotions, as well as inventory management, order management, and customer feedback.
By consolidating multiple operations through a single terminal, retailers can reduce the complex web of vendor hardware and software they rely on. This defragments the retailer offer and increases the efficiency of in-store staff, who can spend more time helping and engaging with customers.
It arms staff with more accessible and integrated data from across the business, giving them everything they need at their fingertips to deliver a hyper-personalised, rewarding customer experience.
Q: The elephant in the room, of course, is artificial intelligence (AI). What is agentic commerce and how could it impact the world of retail?
A: Agentic commerce could completely change how we shop online.
It gives every consumer access to their own personal, highly intelligent shopping assistant that can act upon user instruction and even be authorised to complete purchases.
Every week there is more movement in this space. Open AI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, announced over the summer that its customers can activate an ‘Agent’ functionality on the platform to search and refine products or services. It followed this up with “Buy it in ChatGPT” functionality, allowing users – albeit currently only in the U.S. – to make single-item purchases with select retailers. We expect this service to be expanded to more retailers in 2026, with the protocol being open-source to allow retailers and developers to begin building integrations into their back-end.
Similarly, Google recently announced its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to initiate and transact secure, agent-led payments through mandates and verifiable credentials. As an open protocol, it aims to make agentic commerce more protected and scalable for retailers. At Nexi, we’ve been pleased to be involved in the development of this new protocol and are very excited to help shape the future of agentic commerce as developments rapidly continue.
While the technology is not yet mature, it is easy to see the huge potential: it offers a scenario where, say, a consumer asks it to find the cheapest first-class flights from New York to Milan between May and September, with a morning outbound flight and evening return, vegetarian breakfast and extra leg-room. The AI agent does the heavy lifting in seconds and presents the customer with personalised options.
In this scenario, the traditional checkout – where the user browses a site and adds items to a basket – is removed entirely. It brings a world of personalisation to the consumer in a way that could be transformative for all commerce.
Q: What needs to happen before more of us shop using agentic commerce?
A: Many unanswered questions remain, especially around liability: who is responsible for remedying a situation if something goes wrong?
Taking my example from earlier, if the AI agent booked a flight to Miami instead of Milan, who is liable for the error? If the agent books via a scam website, who will reimburse the customer? What commission will the AI platform take? Open AI has previously discussed charging a two percent affiliate fee, and retailers will have to decide if the trade-off is worth it.
They will also have to grapple with a whole new way of shopping: if commerce becomes conversational as standard, with consumers telling AI what they want rather than browsing pages and filling baskets, the opportunities for upsold or impulse purchases could decline dramatically.
It’s important to note that these changes to the checkout aren’t going to happen overnight. But retailers that recognise this shift early will have the opportunity to differentiative and elevate their customer experience ahead of competitors. As time goes on and more retailers join the transition, these enhanced checkout solutions will become the norm.
Quite simply: a static checkout risks static growth. My message for your readers is to take the checkout to your customers. Or they may take their business elsewhere.
