Payment declines happen millions of times a day, but how a financial institution handles that moment of failure can define the entire customer relationship. My guest on this episode is Amir Wain, the Founder and CEO of i2c, a global payments and banking infrastructure company he has been building for more than 25 years. Amir is a serial entrepreneur who made a foundational architectural bet early on: that a single, customer-centric, composable platform built for all products and all geographies would ultimately win over the industry's prevailing approach of stitching acquisitions together.

That bet has paid off. Today, i2c powers card and banking programs across 200-plus countries for financial institutions, fintechs, and governments alike. In our conversation, we dig into how modern unified payments infrastructure enables real-time contextual decisioning, why the moment of a payment decline is actually an opportunity to build customer trust, how i2c thinks about balancing fraud prevention with false positives, and what the rise of agentic AI means for the authorization process, and for keeping the human customer at the center of it all.

In this podcast, you will learn:

The evolution in Amir’s thinking that led to the founding of i2c.
When he realized that architecture will determine the destiny of the business.
How i2c has evolved over the last 25 years.
How contextual decisioning in the authorization process has become a differentiator for i2c.
Where traditional infrastructure falls short in authorization decisions today.
What fraud signals are the most important when balancing friction and user experience?
How the industry can balance personalization and data privacy.
The three segments of the market that i2c is focused on.
How they are thinking about moving beyond payments.
How they are planning for the world of autonomous AI agents making transactions.
How far away we are from agentic commerce having significant scale.
What keeps Amir excited today about the future.

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Amir Wain, CEO of i2c, on Turning Payment Declines into Trust-Building Moments