The Double Edge of AI in Payments: Google Universal Cart, Deepfake Scams, and PromptPay

This week’s stories pull in two directions at once. AI is making payments faster and more automated than ever, and at the same time, making fraud more convincing than ever. The same technology that smooths a checkout can fabricate a person, a meeting, and a signature. Here is what is happening, and why it matters for merchants, partners, and financial institutions.

Google rebuilds the shopping cart for the age of AI agents

At its I/O 2026 conference, Google introduced Universal Cart. This AI-powered shopping hub lets people add products from Search, the Gemini app, YouTube, and Gmail into a single basket that tracks price drops, checks stock, and flags compatibility issues. When the shopper is ready, they can check out in a few taps with Google Pay or hand the cart off to the merchant’s own site. Launch partners include Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, and Shopify merchants, with a US rollout across Search and Gemini this summer.

The more consequential piece sits underneath. Google also advanced its Agent Payments Protocol, an open framework first announced with more than sixty partners, including Mastercard, American Express, and PayPal, which lets an AI agent purchase on a user’s behalf strictly within pre-set brand, product, and spending limits. Every transaction is captured in a cryptographically signed digital contract, creating a tamper-proof audit trail, and Google has handed the protocol to a standards body to push it industry-wide rather than keeping it proprietary.

Why it matters: Discovery and checkout are being stitched into one assistant-led flow, which changes how merchants get found and how purchases get completed. If buying shifts from visiting a site to instructing an agent, the businesses that are present and trusted inside these protocols win, and the ones that are not risk becoming invisible at the moment of purchase.

The Debia angle: The signal we take from this is that checkout is becoming infrastructure, not a page. Whether a sale closes through an app, an agent or a merchant’s own site, what matters is that acceptance, identity and settlement work seamlessly underneath. Debia’s focus is on making merchants reachable and payable across whatever surface the customer chooses, so a sale is never lost because the plumbing could not keep up with where the buyer actually is.

A S$4.9M deepfake scam shows the dark side of the same AI

The Singapore Police Force has warned of a sharp rise in sophisticated impersonation fraud after a business professional lost S$4.9 million. Scammers staged an elaborate fake Zoom meeting that used deepfake AI to impersonate Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, the President, a cabinet minister and even purported representatives of MAS and global institutions, then sent a forged government letter of guarantee to manufacture credibility before the victim transferred the funds.

The warning landed alongside several large business email compromise cases. In one, a Singapore firm wired around US$36 million after a WhatsApp call from someone posing as its overseas chairman, with investigators later clawing back part of the money through cross-border cooperation. In another, a trader sent US$6.6 million to a fraudulent account after a supplier’s email domain was subtly altered by two transposed letters. The common pattern is AI-generated content and social engineering combining to bypass normal payment approval controls.

Why it matters: Fraud is shifting from sloppy phishing to convincing, fabricated authority, and the weak point is increasingly the human approval step rather than the technology itself. For any business that moves money, this raises the stakes on payee verification, callback procedures and multi-person authorisation, because a single deceived approver can now authorise a multi-million dollar transfer.

The Debia angle: This is exactly why we treat fraud prevention as part of the payment product, not an afterthought. The lesson from these cases is that speed without verification simply gives fraudsters a faster machine. Strong controls, payee checks, transaction monitoring and clear escalation paths are what let merchants and partners move quickly and safely at the same time, and that balance is central to how Debia thinks about moving money.

Thailand shows how a national payment rail can do more

In the region, Thailand is being held up as a case study in getting more out of public payment infrastructure. PromptPay, the country’s national real-time payment system, has become the default way people and businesses move money, and policymakers are now looking at it as a blueprint for modernising trade finance and broader financial infrastructure rather than treating it as a simple peer-to-peer transfer tool.

The argument is that once a fast, low-cost, widely trusted rail is in place, it can carry far more than everyday transfers. Layering richer data, identity and business processes on top of it can streamline areas like trade documentation and supplier payments, which have traditionally been slow and paper-heavy. It is a reminder that the rails ASEAN has built for consumers can become a foundation for commercial finance too.

Why it matters: Across Southeast Asia, real-time rails like PromptPay, PayNow and their cross-border links are now mature, and the real value is in what gets built on top of them. For merchants and businesses, modernised trade finance running on these rails could mean faster settlement, less paperwork and better access to working capital, especially for smaller firms that have struggled with traditional trade finance.

The Debia angle: We watch this closely because it captures how Debia sees infrastructure: the rail is the starting line, not the finish. The real opportunity is in the layer above, where data, identity and clean processes turn a basic transfer rail into something that supports real commercial activity. For the businesses we serve across the region, the winners will be the ones who use these shared rails to remove friction from the parts of trade and payments that still feel stuck in the past.

At Debia, we track these changes because the future of payments will be shaped by speed, trust, interoperability, and smarter financial infrastructure. We do not just process payments. We understand the infrastructure, regulations, technology, and market shifts shaping the future of digital commerce, and we build for where the ecosystem is heading. Want to learn more? Contact Us