Agentic shopping could raise the bar for payments investments, says Apis Partners

Artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistants – dubbed ‘agentic shoppers’ – could soon account for a big chunk of consumer spend, according to researchers. Payments companies will need to keep up with the lightning-fast decisions these virtual assistants make – adding another layer of AI-related diligence for dealmakers in the sector, Matteo Stefanel, managing partner and co-founder at Apis Partners, told PE Hub.

Agentic shoppers could represent $190 billion-$385 billion of US ecommerce spending by 2030, equating to 10-20 percent of market share, according to Morgan Stanley Research. They are a step beyond simply using AI to find products. Instead, they scour the web for items based on their owners’ preferences, looking for deals and negotiating sales with minimal user intervention.

That goes beyond relatively inconsequential items like clothes. The technology could eventually apply to areas like selecting 401k investments, for instance.

“Agentic commerce is going to be a complete revolution,” said Stefanel. “What does that mean for financial services? It means on the other side, you need to have not just commerce agents. The financial institutions will need to be able to participate in that lightspeed discussion between the various agents to facilitate the whole interaction.”

Founded in 2014, Apis invests in financial infrastructure from offices in London, Dubai and Singapore. In May, it announced a $175 million investment in Paymentology, a global issuing and payments processing platform for banks and fintechs, alongside Aspirity Partners.

The changes that tech has brought to the financial sector since Apis’ founding and the potential for artificial intelligence to create even faster upheaval are now at the forefront of Apis’ investment decisions.

“If somebody told me 20 years ago that eventually the biggest finance providers would become brands like Google, like Apple, then I would just laugh,” said Stefanel. “I’d say it’s not going to be allowed. Or if somebody told me that the branding of financial services companies would become irrelevant and they would become completely commoditized, dumb liquidity providers. All of it sounds obvious now, but it was far from obvious maybe even 10 years ago. It’s changing so fast.

“We are really scratching our heads in our investment committees. Is the underlying thesis of this business model an unchangeable truth? Or is this something that is just the outcome of a current inefficiency that may be dissipated or eliminated over the next six months to two years? These are the biggest discussions that we’re having.”

What then made a company like Paymentology a safe bet in the era of AI disruption?

“You really need to differentiate between a simple, tech-only app with small contracts on one side – which can be replicated by a session of vibe coding on Fable – and then on the other extreme, having something like Paymentology, which is a long-term, integrated vertical provision of services that really is impossible to replicate just with AI,” said Stefanel.

“It’s no longer about ‘build and they will come.’ It’s about building two-sided markets. The difficulty is not the platform, it’s not the tech. The difficulty is getting it out there and getting those providers and clients to interact with each other.”

Apis’ focus for the moment is on exits. It has a couple planned before the end of the year, both quite advanced, said Stefanel. The firm closed its Fund III at $1.23 billion, above its $1 billion target earlier this year, and it has another $200 million in co-investments. The firm has realized over $1 billion across Fund I and Fund II. Fund I is fully returned, with over 2.2 DPI or 2.3 on a fully net basis.

Queueing up

Private equity firms already see potential winners from agentic shopping. THL Partners agreed to acquire Queue-It, a developer of software that manages website traffic congestion, from GRO Capital this month, PE Hub revealed.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Queue-It is a cloud-based virtual waiting room for websites and applications to manage online traffic surges. Queue-It’s software takes all humans and non-humans joining a virtual queue, then ranks them in order, generally based on when they’ve arrived.

“This is both a business that is AI-defensible but also is receiving tailwinds from AI,” THL managing director Jordan Welu told PE Hub. “All of our diligence suggests agentic commerce is about 24 months away.”