S3:E3 — Trust as Infrastructure: Innovation, AI, and the Future of Payments

This week we sat down with Ryan Dew, CPO at Thredd — a global issuing processor based in London — for a wide-ranging conversation about what innovation actually looks like when you're building the plumbing that the entire payments ecosystem runs on.

Ryan brings two decades of experience in banking and payments, and he doesn't shy away from the hard questions: how do you innovate responsibly in a highly regulated industry? What does AI actually change — and what has it always been doing quietly in the background? And what does it mean to build trust into a product when the stakes are people's financial health?

We also got into some things we feel strongly about: the myth that platform product management is boring, the real innovation (and the hype) in Buy Now Pay Later, why your FICO score is not a predictor of your ability to pay, and what the pandemic taught us about how fast consumer behavior can actually change when it has to.

If you've ever worked in payments — or wondered why it's so much more complex than it looks — this one's for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMaM7TzmAgk

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. In regulated industries, trust is the product. Innovation in payments isn't about moving fast — it's about building the guardrails first. Trust-as-a-service has moved from a nice-to-have to a foundational requirement, especially as AI and agentic commerce introduce new layers of complexity and risk.

2. The plumbing has to be right before the experience can be delightful. Platform product management gets underestimated, but no consumer experience works if the underlying infrastructure fails. The most innovative fintech UX in the world is worthless if the payment doesn't go through.

3. AI in payments isn't new — but where it's going is. Machine learning has been powering fraud detection in payments for over a decade. The next wave is agentic commerce, intelligent payment routing, and stronger authentication — and stablecoin rails may change cross-border money movement more fundamentally than anything we've seen.

4. Consumer behavior changes faster than we think — when it has to. The pandemic forced entire markets to shift from cash to digital payments almost overnight. The lesson for product managers: when the benefit is clear and the reason is compelling, people adapt. The job is to make that transition feel safe and obvious.

QUESTIONS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS

1. Where in your product are you building with live electricity — and where are you just painting the walls? Do you know the difference?

2. Are you close enough to the infrastructure your product runs on to know what breaks when something goes wrong?

3. What consumer behavior are you assuming is fixed — and what would it take to change it?