Why In-Solutions Global believes trust and compliance will define the agentic commerce era

At Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, In-Solutions Global (ISG) laid out its vision for agentic commerce — AI agents that can discover, decide and transact on behalf of users — while cautioning that trust, compliance and consumer education will define the next payments cycle. ISG called for a phased rollout, with robust guardrails built in as a foundational layer of the money-movement rail rather than an afterthought.

If the first era of digital payments had been designed around people making transactions, that premise is set to be overtaken by the advent of the agentic era. At the seventh Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026 in Mumbai, the larger consensus seemed to be around the rise of agentic commerce, where artificial intelligence (AI) agents act on behalf of consumers and merchants to discover products, negotiate terms and execute payments, with the human setting the intent and guardrails rather than approving every individual step.

Against this backdrop, The Economic Times sat down with senior leadership of In-Solutions Global, a payments solutions provider operating across India, Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Southeast Asia, to unpack what the agentic commerce era signifies. The company's leaders — co-founder and managing director Adelia Castelino and chief strategy and transformation officer Sachin Castelino — used the GFF platform to signal both ambition and caution. They framed agentic commerce not just as a technology upgrade, but as a "trust architecture" where compliance, governance and consumer protection become as critical as speed and convenience.

Freedom, friction and the new consumer burden

Sachin Castelino opened with a stark framing of the shift: "Earlier, what used to happen is that a lot of FinTechs or a lot of consumer experiences were driven by organisations driving them. Now, a lot more of that experience can now be done by the consumers themselves." On paper, that sounds liberating, until one probes deeper. "How they want to interact with the payments ecosystem, or how they want to interact with the commerce ecosystem, is now more in their hands, which, in my mind, is like a little bit of a double-edged sword," Sachin added.

The trade-off, he argued, lies between freedom and responsibility. While, on one hand, it offers flexibility, personalisation and speed, on the other, it imposes a heavier cognitive and security burden on users who must now understand how to delegate authority to machines. "There is more that you need to understand as to how to use a particular system. But at the end of the day, there is a lot more flexibility that comes in for the consumers," Sachin noted, before adding a warning: "Tread with a little bit of caution there as well."

Mandates, guardrails and the rise of agent-to-agent payments

Adelia sharpened the operational stakes. "You're giving the agent a mandate — a bound instruction," she said. "Basis that instruction, it initiates a transaction, and the guardrails verify whether that instruction is genuine, or whether it's been spoofed and shouldn't be honoured." The promise, she argued, is efficiency — "much faster than what's happening today" — but the requirement is unforgiving: "At scale, at speed, you'll have two agents negotiating with each other. It can be an agent-to-agent payment."

Merchants, mandates and the anatomy of trust

For merchants, agentic commerce is not merely a new checkout flow — it is a new liability surface. ISG's leadership emphasised that enablers like itself are accountable "both on the merchant side as well as the consumer side" as payment rails are re-engineered for autonomous transactions. That accountability begins at onboarding: certifying who the agent is, verifying what it's doing, and ensuring authorisation lands on time. "Our onboarding of the agent is very important," Adelia said. "We need to certify the agent, verify the transaction, and make sure the authorisation happens on time."

Crucially, every autonomous payment must leave a defensible trail. "At the end of the exercise, you have a digital trail — evidence that, in case of disputes, you can show the consumer this was the instruction they gave, and this is the transaction that resulted from it," she explained, pointing to digital signatures and auditability as non-negotiables. Adelia also warned that the arrival of post-quantum cryptography will raise the stakes for payment enablers: as quantum computing eventually renders today's cryptographic signatures breakable, enablers will be responsible for preserving and protecting evidence from the past, present and future to maintain trust across the entire transaction lifecycle.

With governance guardrails emerging as the cornerstone of autonomous finance, regulatory and compliance frameworks are not afterthoughts for ISG; they are becoming a core differentiator. Sachin was blunt: "Payments is something that touches everybody's lives... the ability to be compliant, the ability to be secure and the most important piece is consumer protection." His bet is on organisations that "work on compliance by design", even if they do not look "the best and the jazziest thing right now". "Building on that framework now will help with the next four or five years, or at least that's the bet that we take," he said.

From India to the world: GIFT City, 190 markets and the UPI edge

ISG's geographic ambition is explicit. Adelia tied India's global opportunity to its proven stack and evolving regulation: "India has the potential to grow exponentially in the global markets. We have proved it to the world on our UPI [unified payments interface] stack." She pointed to simplified licensing, regulatory encouragement of innovation, and the digital privacy and data protection law as tailwinds.

The company's IFSCA licences are the launchpad for that ambition. "ISG has the privilege of holding these licenses in GIFT City, which enables ISG to grow its business across 190 countries," Adelia said. For ISG, the licences do more than open a jurisdiction — they position the company to build a genuinely global payments infrastructure business from an Indian base, extending its agentic-commerce capabilities into cross-border markets. Yet Adelia's tone was as measured as it was ambitious: she expects strong adoption as ISG scales AI-powered transaction infrastructure across these new markets, but insists execution, governance and consumer trust must scale in step with innovation.

OTP to passkeys: the authentication lineage

"We had the first layer of authentication in the first wave of digital payments, and that was OTP. So the next wave is going to be passkeys," the moderator suggested. Adelia agreed: "Yes. And what that means is the control of the transaction — and its authentication — stays with the consumer. We've already gone through tokenisation. Now we're moving into this next layer." In her telling, it sets the foundation for what comes after: "From here, it sets the base for your agentic payments."

Why this matters now

Agentic commerce is no longer a rhetorical trope. Across GFF 2026, banks, fintechs and merchants demonstrated it live — agents discovering, comparing and checking out on tokenised, passkey-authenticated rails, with real transactions rather than concept decks.

The question, then, is no longer whether agentic commerce arrives, but how it gets governed at scale. ISG's message throughout was consistent: trust has to be built as infrastructure, not bolted on after adoption. That means certified agents, real-time validation, immutable audit trails, and compliance designed in from day one — not retrofitted once volumes force the issue.

Sachin sharpened why this urgency is not optional. "Things are at everyone's fingertips. But now you have to use it with a lot more caution, so that there's a lot more control — because it can take over your lives very, very quickly." The risk, he warned, is systemic rather than individual: a surge in mistaken purchases and the disputes that follow could damage trust across the entire commerce ecosystem, not just for the merchant or consumer involved.

Taken together, ISG's GFF appearance read less like a product pitch and more like a positioning statement. The company is betting that the winners in agentic commerce will be the ones who treat governance as a feature, not a constraint — certifying agents, validating transactions in real time, and preserving evidence across their lifecycle. And with its GIFT City licences already in place, ISG is signalling that this trust architecture is meant to travel with it, as agentic payments move beyond India into the markets it's now positioned to serve.