FIS Says Purchase Data Will Push Payments Beyond Transactions

Jakob Harrison said he does not buy the idea that payments executives should spend their days looking over their shoulders. There are too many things to look at. Artificial intelligence is advancing. Agentic commerce is taking shape. Consumer expectations are moving with technology. Competitors are pursuing many of the same customers with products that can be difficult to tell apart. Harrison, senior vice president of payment networks at FIS®, said treating each development as an impending threat would make it harder, not easier, to decide what the company should do.

Harrison spoke with PYMNTS as part of the What’s Next in Payments series, which put former Intel Chairman Andy Grove’s “only the paranoid survive” philosophy to payments executives.

As Harrison said, “when I think of paranoia, I think of everything and everyone is out to get me, and everything is a signal.”

Vigilance is more selective, Harrison said. Markets throw off scattered data points all the time. Some will prove consequential. Many will not. The work is in determining which ones belong together before the answer becomes obvious. That’s why Harrison didn’t name AI, cyber risk, regulation or a particular competitor when asked what keeps him awake. He named speed.

Not payment speed, but the speed of change itself. Technology is being introduced faster, and consumers are adjusting their expectations accordingly, Harrison said. Companies that recognize where these expectations are heading can still lose ground if they take too long to respond.

“The opportunity cost of not moving fast enough toward a world that we can already see will haunt us,” Harrison said.

Payments companies have less room for error because moving faster does not relieve them of the obligations they already have. The industry has become “immensely good at reliability and scalability and trust,” Harrison said. These capabilities are now table stakes, and the benchmark cannot fall while companies pursue whatever comes next.

Consumers, however, are asking for more than dependable processing. Harrison pointed to easier and more contextual interactions as part of that demand. FIS therefore must preserve the machinery consumers rarely notice while determining what additional value can be built around a transaction.

Harrison said he doesn’t expect the market to provide a clean moment when it is time to make that move.

“It’s a rare occurrence for there to be a big bang inflection point,” he said. “It’s usually the accumulation of a number of items.”

What the Purchase Adds to the Payment

Harrison said he believes one of those changes is occurring in the information that can accompany a transaction.

He called it a move from transaction processing to transaction intelligence. The difference is straightforward. A payment tells a company that a transaction occurred. More detailed information about the purchase can tell it what occurred.

“The content of what someone is buying is far more relevant and valuable to that person and to those that are trying to provide services to them than the fact that they made a payment,” Harrison said.

FIS Smart Basket™ is built around that premise. It’s the item-level network the company is building into payments. FIS sees separate pain points that additional data and intelligence could address, Harrison said. Smart Basket is intended to make item-level information available to participants, giving them more context about a transaction than the payment record alone provides.

Harrison connected that work directly to AI and agentic commerce, although he didn’t cast either technology as the inflection point itself. An AI agent needs context to make a useful decision. Without good contextual transaction data, an agentic commerce application could end up providing little more value than consumers get by handling a purchase themselves.

He said his approach is to establish where the company intends to go and use competitor activity as another piece of information. If another provider moves toward the same opportunity, that may confirm rather than invalidate FIS’ reading of the market.

That requires some tolerance for being early and some willingness to change course when the evidence changes. Harrison said he tells his team to avoid being reactive and instead be “directional,” making decisions that move toward the position it has chosen unless the signals begin pointing elsewhere.

He said his advice for the industry is equally practical. Payments executives will not know in real time which collection of developments historians eventually label an inflection point. However, they still have to recognize the pieces as they accumulate. Paranoia sees danger everywhere. Vigilance decides what is worth doing something about.

Watch the full What’s Next in Payments conversation with FIS’ Jakob Harrison to learn: