Sovereignty, performance, resilience: the new retail trade-offs

The retail balancing act: between costs and independence

Between the frantic proliferation of payment methods (QR codes, wallets, BNPL) and the arrival of new infrastructure, the daily life of retailers is increasingly becoming a high-wire act. Sovereignty, performance, and resilience: what are the new trade-offs in retail?

During the latest roundtable organized by Purse, Géraldine Cornuel (Head of Digital Payments & Orders Orchestration, Auchan Retail), Yousra Pesquet (Business Development Manager, CB), Laetitia Dorla (Director of Business Acceptance France, Wero), and Cédric Cagna (EY France Payments Leader | Technology Consulting, EY) shared their insights on these new trade-offs.

1. The merchant diagnosis: the end of complex integrations and the reign of ROI

For a retail giant, the approach to payments is primarily dictated by a demanding operational reality. Transaction costs and conversion rates remain the absolute masters of decision-making.

The IT roadmap bottleneck

One of the main obstacles to innovation is not a lack of will, but the rigidity of internal systems. If a merchant's payment chain is not modern enough and their IT roadmap is locked in for the next 18 months, integrating new solutions becomes an operational challenge.

For a merchant like Auchan, a solution must satisfy a strict triptych:

• Business alignment: improving basket conversion without cannibalizing existing payment methods that are already optimized and less expensive.
• The technical promise: combining speed, simplicity, and total resilience. Faced with the risk of outages, IT teams deploy backup solutions so that the customer can pay in-store or online no matter what.
• Customer adoption: if the end consumer does not perceive immediate added value (fluidity, time savings), the tool remains an empty shell.

2. Sovereignty and performance: the end of a false debate

One of the major takeaways from this discussion is that sovereignty is no longer just a European political ideal: it is a weapon of commercial competitiveness.

The European response to Big Tech's $400 billion dominance

American giants and international schemes boast massive market valuations reaching $400 billion, providing them with virtually unlimited funds to finance aggressive marketing campaigns or acquire promising tech startups. Yet, Europe is proving it knows how to fight back. Sovereignty is also measured indirectly: through better cost control and a drastic reduction in fraud.

Auchan's commitment to independence

At Auchan, sovereignty translates into very clear technical decisions to avoid being subject to externally imposed standards:

• Local routing: systematically processing transactions via the national CB network for all co-badged cards.
• Strategic pacing: the retailer has intentionally slowed the adoption of technologies pushed by international schemes, such as Click to Pay or Network Tokenization, in order to calmly assess their actual impact on the group's independence.

Why the CB network outperforms in e-commerce

Serving as the "last mile of our economy," the Cartes Bancaires (CB) network holds nearly 80% market share in France. Managed as a non-profit consortium, it charges for its services at cost, proving to be up to 20 times cheaper than its international competitors.

Beyond pricing, there is a technical superiority in e-commerce, where CB generates 1 to 3 percentage points more in conversion. This performance is due to the network's unique operation: French banks, which own and control CB's mechanisms, place maximum trust in it. By co-developing authentication and authorization protocols (via the Fast’R and Safe’Rprograms), acceptance rates are mechanically optimized.

Wero: from political initiative to real-world usage

Wero is no longer just a concept on paper. Backed by an unprecedented alliance of European banks, the network already relies on a solid base of 54 million users across France, Germany, and Belgium.

Laetitia Dorla shared the behind-the-scenes story of this technological journey: originally (with the Monnet projects in 2012, followed by PEPSI and EPI), Europe aimed to launch a new bank card. Faced with the financial heterogeneity of banks and the entrenched nature of the card model, the ecosystem made a major strategic pivot toward instant account-to-account transfers.

The realization of the value of this sovereign shield has also become geopolitical. International sanctions serve as a catalyst: the recent ban on Visa and Mastercard payments in Cuba highlights the fragility of exclusive dependency.

Today, the public is embracing Wero, breaking down generational barriers. Proof of this integration into daily life: consumer communities have even launched a petition on Reddit demanding that platforms like BlaBlaCar integrate Wero as a payment method.

3. Agentic Commerce: it’s not the future, it’s the present

The panel discussion addressed the most disruptive transformation of the year:Agentic Commerce. Consumer behavior is evolving at lightning speed. The adoption rate of purchases delegated to AI-powered agents is set to jump from 4% in 2024 to 25% by the end of 2026.

Proof that the shift is underway: the sector has just experienced a historic first in Europe. The Dutch retailer Worldline has processed Europe's very first automated commercial transaction, executed end-to-end between an AI buying agent and a local terminal.

For merchants, the risk is losing all visibility if their systems do not become "AI-ready" immediately. To capture these automated decision flows, retailers must act on three key fronts:

1. Technical transparency: structure product catalogs and expose open APIs. Commercial and promotional rules must no longer be buried within the site, but must be perfectly readable by AI agent algorithms.
2. Radical simplification: streamline the checkout process by integrating standard brand selection and authentication mechanisms.
3. The legal framework: anticipate consent management protocols to secure and reassure users.

Orchestrate to avoid fragmentation

Payment has definitively cemented its status as a major strategic asset for commerce. Faced with the explosion of new use cases (AI, wallets, instant transfers), the main danger for merchants is fragmenting their customer journey and seeing their technical costs spiral out of control.

To successfully bridge the gap between cost control and the quest for independence, the solution lies inpayment orchestration. By relying on a unified platform like Purse, retailers regain control of their architecture.

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