Yuno's CEO says his AI agent still pays with a raw card number

Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder and CEO of the payments company Yuno, told a Web Summit audience in Lisbon on 10 November that his flight to the conference was booked by his AI agent, which paid with card details he gave it by photographing his credit card.Web Summit Lisbon 2026, Stage 8 livestream (Day One).

Ortega said that is how agents pay today: through checkouts built for people, taking “the 16-digit number, the expiration, the CVV”. He called it the worst option, because it exposes all of the card’s information. The same details turn up in breaches: a crypto card firm’s breach notice listed one customer’s card number and CVV, as we reported on 9 November.The S-Curve: Gnosis Pay breach email lists card number, CVV and linked wallets.

Why the agent falls back to the card

Ortega said Yuno’s own test wallet is connected to the agent payment protocols, including Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. Those protocols are meant to give the agent a token in place of the card. In his tests, he said, the first attempt normally fails because the network is not ready, and the agent then types in the raw card, which works.

He added that merchant adoption of the protocols is slower than he expected. His prediction for the next 12 months is that agents keep paying like humans, with raw card details. He also said there is no clear way to measure how many purchases agents make, because agents try to pass as human.

What the two companies sell

Both panelists run companies that sit between merchants and the firms that process their payments. Ortega is co-founder and CEO of Yuno, and Gabriel Le Roux is co-founder and CEO of Primer. A merchant that uses such a layer connects once and can then route payments to several providers, rather than building each connection itself.

Le Roux said the old arrangement has ended: merchants can no longer rely on a single payment service provider. His view of agents is that checkouts were built for humans and merchants now need checkouts that can deal with AI agents. He said agentic commerce repeats what payments went through over 15 years, with many competing protocols and merchants unsure which will win.

Le Roux also gave a figure for his own company. He said Primer’s customers send on average about 95% to 97% of their payments through Primer, which gives it the data to build an intelligence layer. The figure is Primer’s own.

The case for connecting to many providers

Ortega made the case from experience. He said there are thousands of ways to pay, and that the choice changes by country, citing Pix in Brazil, iDEAL in the Netherlands and UPI in India. At Rappi, which he co-founded, he said he connected 12 to 15 payment providers and for about seven years ran a team of 50 people working only on payment integrations and optimisation.

Yuno now sells that connection as a service. Ortega said large companies including Uber and GoFundMe use Yuno to process payments in over 190 countries.

He also described a shift in how people pay online. He said wallets went from about 20% of online payments ten years ago to about 60% today. Worldpay’s Global Payments Report puts it a little lower: digital payment methods rose from 19% of global e-commerce spend in 2014 to 57% in 2024,Worldpay Global Payments Report 2025, summary. and wallets alone were 53% in 2024.

Where each expects things to go

Asked what he is most bullish on for 2030, Ortega pointed to the growth of Apple Pay and to local winners such as Pix and UPI, rather than one global method. In his words, the world is not getting a global winner but seeing small winners in each country.

Le Roux said he is most excited about AI applied to payment strategy. He said most Primer customers already work with its agent, Companion, which recommends strategies.

The panel ran on day one of a Web Summit whose billing leads with China, which gave Chinese speakers 16 of its top 20 slots, as we reported on 10 November.The S-Curve: Web Summit gives China 16 of its top 20 speaker slots. Boaz Sobrado, who reviews The S-Curve’s stories, moderated the panel on Web Summit’s MoneyConf stage.