Merchant onboarding is where growth goes to die, and where fraud quietly sneaks in. We sit down with Noam Izhaki, Co-founder and CEO of Ballerine, to unpack why the payments stack can feel real-time and automated while KYC, KYB, underwriting, and compliance still depend on slow investigations, scattered systems, and ever-growing analyst teams.
We walk through Noam’s journey from building early online platforms in Tel Aviv to learning hard lessons in remittances and then at Wix, where the same merchant risk challenges showed up at scale. That experience led to Ballerine: a platform designed to help merchant acquirers, PSPs, marketplaces, card ecosystem players, and banks bring their policies and data into one place and use AI agents to automate decisions across the seller lifecycle, from onboarding through ongoing monitoring. We also dig into how this differs from traditional fraud and compliance point solutions that provide signals but still leave the hardest part, judgment, to humans.
Then we zoom out to the future of payments: agentic commerce, agents buying from other agents, and a world where creating “a business” is cheap, fast, and sometimes fake. Noam shares what he’s seeing around fraud industrialization, including transaction laundering as a service, and why the biggest advantage may be becoming a true trust layer for the internet with real-time, global risk decisions.
If you’re building for scale, ask yourself whether your plan requires hiring your way out of risk. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a payments leader who’s feeling the pressure, and leave a review with your biggest question about AI in merchant risk.
