AI solution development has turned into an arms race. Some tech leaders ponder slowing it down, others object it will hinder the innovation. Little however is spoken about what end consumers and businesses think about it all. In this article, Scott Dawson, CEO at DECTA UK, explores something the AI arms race has largely overlooked: merchants’ POV.
Artificial intelligence is dominating conversation whether that’s on the conference stage, in the product roadmap, or in the investment deck. Follow the money and the picture is even clearer with AI investment accelerating at a remarkable rate that the Bank of England now describes as a financial stability risk in its own right, with valuations in the sector looking, in its words, stretched.
It is therefore worth taking a moment to consider what merchants actually asked for. Because when we surveyed 500 UK SME decision-makers for our 2026 research, they told us something the AI arms race has largely overlooked. They are not asking for the latest and greatest technology; they are asking for something they can trust.
What are merchants prioritising
Our research points to an unambiguous priority. More than half of merchants (51.8%) placed security ahead of everything else. Not the newest technology or cheaper fees, and certainly not AI. This is not a marginal finding but a majority telling the industry that its loudest, best-funded investment story is aimed at the wrong target.
Merchants believe payment security is their customers’ single biggest priority at the checkout (48.6%), with simplicity close behind (42.2%). By contrast, just 39.2% rank technology capability first. The people closest to the transaction are not asking for a cleverer checkout, they are asking for one that does not lose them money or expose the people paying them. That does not make AI unimportant but it does suggest the industry has become rather good at answering a question that merchants never actually asked.
The cost
It’s also worth noting the price of the race and who really picks up the tab. The five largest US hyperscalers alone are expected to spend close to $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, almost twice compared the previous year. Meanwhile the Bank of England has warned that a sharp correction in AI stocks could strip as much as 2.2 percentage points off UK GDP – enough to constitute a recession.
Compute costs money. Energy costs money. Capital costs money. And in payments, those costs do not simply disappear. Over time, they find their way into the economics of the industry, including the fees merchants pay.
That’s something that is already a sore point with 16.2% of merchants telling us fees are simply too high. That figure rises to 27.2% among the smallest businesses, precisely those least able to absorb costs driven by someone else’s investment agenda. For a micro-merchant, being asked to contribute to an enormous infrastructure build-out in exchange for capabilities they did not ask for is a hard proposition to justify.
AI is giving fraudsters new weapons
Unfortunately, the technology attracting some of the industry’s biggest investments is also helping to intensify the very threat merchants are most concerned about. Generative AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to sophisticated fraud. In the UK, deepfake fraud attempts have risen by 94%, and AI-related fraud has climbed from under a quarter of cases to more than a third in the space of a year.
Criminals can generate credible phishing campaigns, reproduce someone’s voice from seconds of audio and create synthetic identities at a scale that would previously have required far more time and expertise. Fraud is becoming industrialised, and AI is one of the technologies making that possible.
Merchants are already anticipating the consequences with a quarter (25.2%) saying they expect fraud and financial crime to get worse over the next three years. It is a reasonable concern. The industry is committing huge sums to a technology that is also giving the people on the other side of the transaction new tools to attack it.
Innovation must be useful
The same instinct can be seen beyond the industry, including in Westminster. One of the new government’s first decisions was to bring the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology into a larger business department, creating the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. Industry groups criticised the move as the wrong change at the wrong moment, while others will argue that a new prime minister should have the freedom to reshape government as they see fit.
What interests me is the reflex: the assumption that innovation is a label you can bolt onto a growth agenda, rather than a discipline with a purpose of its own.
Calling something innovative does not make it useful. Every new feature should face a much simpler test: does it address a problem a merchant actually experiences? Does it get their money to them faster? Reduce chargebacks or stop customers abandoning the checkout? Or does it give fraud teams an advantage rather than another problem to manage. Those are the measures that matter. Novelty alone does not pass the test, regardless of how much money has been invested behind it.
Putting trust first
None of this is an argument for rejecting technology, nor is it a case for the payments industry to stop innovating. AI has an important and expanding role to play in fraud prevention, reconciliation and making better use of the payment data merchants already have. When it is applied to a genuine, clearly defined problem, it can deliver real value.
But it earns that place by being useful – reliable infrastructure may never generate the same headlines as the latest AI breakthrough, but it is what keeps payments moving, protects businesses and allows merchants to concentrate on running them. The crux is that it is more important to be trusted than trending. The payments industry talks a great deal about the future. The merchants we surveyed are asking for something more practical, they want a provider that treats their trust as the product, not an afterthought.
About the author
Scott Dawson, CEO at DECTA UK, is a highly motivated and results-oriented individual with over 20 years of experience within the payments industry. He is committed to driving DECTA’s UK strategy forward, with a focus on its growth within the UK and supporting small to medium businesses with its broad range of payment solutions.
