2026 Agenda

Registration & Breakfast

Welcome to IMPACT 2026

Founder's Session: The Future of Retail

AI agents are poised to fundamentally change how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy from brands. This session looks beyond today’s technology to explore what commerce could look like as personalized agents increasingly act on customers’ behalf. Forter’s founders will unpack what this shift means for merchant discovery, trust, and customer relationships — and the decisions businesses should be making now.

Innovation in the Age of AI: What's New at Forter

As agentic AI reshapes commerce, trust is becoming more critical at every stage of the customer journey. Forter’s leadership will share a forward-looking vision for building trust into personalized experiences and smarter business decisions. The session will also feature a merchant showcase demonstrating how technology is being used to solve real-world business challenges.

Merchant Showcase: Beyond Fraud

The impact of fraud now extends well beyond chargebacks and approval rates, influencing performance across the business. Hear from merchants who are tackling major organizational challenges and demonstrating the broader business impact of their fraud and risk strategies. The session will close with a recap of the day’s key insights and takeaways.

The Agentic Checkout: Is your Payments Stack Ready?

Your payments stack was built around a human — someone clicking through checkout, proving who they are, deciding to buy. Agent-initiated transactions break those assumptions: they change how payments flow, who or what authenticates, where liability sits, and what a smart routing strategy looks like. In this breakout session, a merchant already seeing agent volume walks through how they're adapting their stack for a buyer that behaves nothing like the one it was designed for — where the old routing and authentication logic holds up, and where it breaks. If you're staring at a stack you know wasn't built for this, it's a chance to see how someone else is starting to re-build theirs.

Every Decline Has a Story: Winning More Good Payments by Understanding Your Customers

Not every decline should happen. Issuer behavior, authentication requirements, payment routing, network performance, and customer history all influence whether a legitimate purchase succeeds or fails. Join this peer discussion to explore how leading merchants are improving payment performance. We'll discuss which metrics actually matter, where the biggest opportunities exist, and how teams are balancing conversion, fraud, and customer experience.

Bridging CX and Customer Service: Closing the Handoff Gap

Merchants have spent years stripping friction out of the customer journey — until the moment something goes wrong and the customer lands in a service queue that reports to a different leader, tracks different metrics, and doesn't always have access to the same systems and information. That handoff is where a lot of the goodwill built upstream quietly leaks away. This table talk is a working session for practitioners trying to close that gap — how to align CX and customer service around shared metrics instead of competing ones, and what it actually takes to make the handoff feel invisible to the customer even when the org chart says otherwise.

LUNCH

Leading Through The Shift: How Senior Commerce Leaders Are Navigating Change Right Now

Fraud, payments, and AI are converging fast, and the leaders getting ahead are making calls on org design, budget, and strategy before the playbook exists to back them up. This is a candid, unscripted conversation among senior commerce leaders about the decisions actually on their desks: how they're redrawing team and org structures as these functions merge; where they're placing bets across technology, partners, and people; how they make the internal case ahead of the proof; and how they hold a team together when the ground won't sit still. If you're making these same calls without a template to follow, this is the room where you'll hear how your peers are approaching them.

What Does It Take to Reduce Agentic Risk?

As AI agents begin taking actions on behalf of customers, merchants face new questions around trust, control, identity, permission, fraud, and accountability. The challenge is not simply deciding whether to adopt agentic commerce, but understanding what needs to be in place before it can scale safely. In this breakout, practitioners will discuss how they are evaluating AI use cases and providers, where risk emerges as experimentation moves into production, and which controls matter most. Attendees will leave with a practical view of what merchants should assess now to prepare for agentic commerce without getting ahead of the technology."

Designing a Payments System That Bends, Not Breaks

The best payments system isn't the one that works today — it's the one that still works when everything else changes. This session explores what it really means to have an objective, agnostic foundation for your payments strategy, and why that independence matters more than ever as payment methods, regulations, and customer expectations keep shifting. You'll leave with a clearer framework for spotting hidden constraints in your current stack and a practical sense of what genuine flexibility looks like, so you can adopt what's next without re-building what you already have.

Beyond the Return: How Much is Policy Abuse REALLY Costing You?

Returns and policy abuse cost far more than the refund itself — and it's genuine customers who pay for it, through tighter policies, longer waits, and lower trust built to guard against someone else's behavior. This breakout features a merchant putting hard numbers to that hidden cost and then tackling it directly — including the hardest part: telling a genuine return from an abusive one when the two can look nearly identical, and tightening controls without punishing the customers they most want to keep.

A Self Assessment: How Ready is Your Business for Agents…Really?

Agentic readiness is easy to talk about in the abstract — this is your chance to figure out where you actually stand. Led by a senior fraud leader whose team is deep in agentic integration right now, this small-group, round-table working session has you map your own position across the three dimensions that decide readiness: catalog infrastructure, payments rail, and the trust and identity layer. By the end, you'll have an honest read on your own gaps — and a sharper sense of what "ready" actually looks like from people working the same problem.

Sizing the prize: making the investment case before you have the data

Every technical decision about agentic readiness has a budget decision sitting upstream of it — and it reaches your desk well before the ROI data does. This is a small-group, round-table conversation for leaders wrestling with how far and how fast to commit when the business case has to be built on conviction, not a finished spreadsheet. It's the room where you hear how peers are sizing the opportunity and defending the spend internally — the part of the job that rarely gets talked about openly.

What’s Killing Your Conversion Rate: The Gap Hiding in Plain Sight

You've optimized everything up to the buy button: personalization, payment methods, a frictionless checkout. But the buy button was never the finish line. In the split second after a customer hits "place order," a chain of decisions runs between your stack, their bank, and the payments ecosystem — and it decides whether the sale actually completes. That layer is optimizable, and it shows up in conversion rate, acceptance rate and customer acquisition cost. This roundtable is for those who own the outcome but not the infrastructure. It digs into where routing, authentication, and fraud decisions are costing you good customers, what a growing payment-method mix does to your backend, and how to make the internal case when payments isn't yours to own.

A World Without Humans: How do you Build Loyalty When You’re Dealing with a Bot

Loyalty programs were designed to earn a person's attention — the points, the tiers, the nudges that keep people coming back. Strip out the human and hand the decision to an agent optimizing for price and speed, and most of that architecture has nothing to grab onto. Led by a merchant who's rethinking loyalty for exactly this shift, this table topic is a hands-on diagnostic: audit your own loyalty setup through the eyes of an automated buyer and find where it holds up, where it collapses, and what still earns loyalty when no one's there to feel it.

A view from the top: Peer Lessons in Leadership

The advice that actually changes how you lead rarely comes polished — it usually comes from someone telling you what they'd do differently. A senior commerce leader opens by sharing how they approach the decisions that don't have clean answers — where they focus, how they weigh the tradeoffs, what experience has taught them — and then it opens into a candid exchange where everyone at the table trades their own perspective. It's less about any single topic than about how good leaders actually make the calls that don't come with a playbook.

Apparel, Accessories & Beauty Food & Beverage/QSR Retail Distribution & Marketplaces

networking break

From SEO to GEO: How Agents Discover Your Brand

Agent-driven discovery is challenging the traditional assumption that a human is always behind the search. This session explores how merchants can evolve from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for generative and agentic discovery. We’ll examine the role of identity, intent signals, and trust as brands prepare for a customer journey increasingly mediated by AI agents.

Prepare for the future while optimizing the present

Most payment strategies were tuned for a world that's shifting under them: human buyers, predictable routing, issuers who read traffic the way they always have. As Payments becomes increasingly complex, the gap between what’s worked in the past and what will take you to the future are starting to surface— in routing logic, in multi-processor strategy, in how issuers approve this new traffic. In this table topic, a Payments leader who's already re-architecting for it opens with the approach they're taking, then the table gets into specifics: what's working across routing, processors, and issuer relationships, and what everyone's still figuring out.

Governance and controls: who decides what agents can do on your behalf?

You have terms and conditions for your customers — you don't yet have them for the software shopping on their behalf. Almost no one does: the trust hierarchies, rules of engagement, and governance frameworks for agentic interactions are still being written from scratch. The hard question underneath it all: when an agent shows up acting on behalf of a customer, what do you let it do — and who decides? A merchant opens with where they've landed, then the table digs in: what an agent can do unsupervised, where a human stays in the loop, and how you write rules for something no one's defined yet.

Solving the abuse conundrum: who owns it, and what do you actually do?

Everyone knows the usual abuse culprits— the promo, returns, and loyalty abuse that chips away at margins. The harder part is what to actually do about it without impacting the experience for genuine customers. This working session skips the diagnosis and gets straight to tactics. A merchant opens up the discussion with the moves they're making to catch abuse earlier, then the table works through the real trade-off underneath all of it: how far you can tighten controls before the friction costs you more than the abuse does. Bring the abuse pattern you haven't cracked, because someone else at the table has probably fought it.

Bridging CX and Customer Service: Closing the Handoff Gap

Merchants have invested heavily in removing friction from the customer journey, yet much of that goodwill can disappear when a customer needs help. This working session explores how CX and customer service teams can align around shared metrics, systems, and goals. Attendees will compare approaches for creating a seamless customer experience even when ownership spans different teams.

Apparel, Accessories & Beauty Growth Merchants Retail Distribution & Marketplaces

By popular demand, we'll be hosting vertical-specific tables alongside our use-case tables — giving merchants a chance to connect with direct peers in their space. Choose from: Apparel, Accessories & Beauty; Growth Merchants; and Retail Distribution & Marketplaces.

What Do You Believe Now That You Didn't Believe This Morning?

Networking Reception at City Vineyard

Join us after the program for bites and beverages at City Vineyard — one of New York's most scenic outdoor spots, right on the Hudson River with skyline views.