Pollinate at Stripe Sessions 2026: AI, Infrastructure and the Future of Commerce

Pollinate was delighted to be invited to attend Stripe Sessions 2026 this year, joining thousands of fintech leaders, developers, banks, platforms and commerce innovators discussing the next phase of digital commerce infrastructure. What stood out immediately was the sheer pace of innovation.

Fiona Roach Canning

Stripe continues to position itself as one of the most future-looking companies in global fintech, with a series of ambitious live demonstrations showcasing how AI is rapidly reshaping commerce, software development and customer experiences. The event focused heavily on agentic commerce, AI-native financial infrastructure and the growing role of software platforms in orchestrating increasingly complex ecosystems.

There was also a strong emphasis on the convergence of online and in-person commerce. Stripe demonstrated how it is continuing to expand deeper into physical point-of-sale experiences and unified commerce through its terminal and in-person payments capabilities, helping merchants operate more seamlessly across channels.

Alongside this innovation, another theme emerged consistently throughout the conference: the continued strategic importance of the bank channel, particularly for serving small and medium-sized businesses.

While fintech innovation often focuses on direct-to-merchant models, many discussions recognised that banks still originate and support a significant proportion of SMB financial relationships globally. As commerce infrastructure evolves, there is growing recognition that banks remain critical distribution, trust and servicing channels for millions of businesses.

The event also highlighted how the financial stack itself is beginning to evolve. Stablecoins, programmable money and global treasury infrastructure featured prominently across sessions and conversations, reflecting broader industry interest in how money movement may become faster, more interoperable and increasingly software-defined over time.

For Pollinate, many of the themes discussed at Sessions strongly resonated with ongoing conversations happening across banking, payments and connected commerce. The future increasingly appears to belong to platforms capable of connecting fragmented infrastructure, embedding financial services more intelligently and enabling commerce to operate seamlessly across channels, ecosystems and AI-driven experiences.

Watch this space.

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