Wesley Rios, U.S and Latam Partnerships Lead at Morph – Interview Series

Wesley Rios, U.S and Latam Partnerships Lead at Morph, is a payments and fintech executive with more than 15 years of experience spanning global financial institutions and emerging blockchain infrastructure. At Morph, he leads partnerships across the United States and Latin America, working with payment providers, fintechs, wallets, remittance companies, and enterprises to integrate stablecoin-based settlement into real-world payment flows. Prior to joining Morph, Rios spent more than a decade at Mastercard (MA ) , where he held senior product leadership roles focused on fintech partnerships, financial inclusion, government disbursements, and global payment strategy. Earlier in his career, he held regional product management positions at J.P. Morgan and Citigroup, helping expand payment capabilities and banking partnerships across Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. His expertise spans strategic partnerships, payment networks, cross-border commerce, onchain settlement, and stablecoin infrastructure, with a focus on bridging traditional finance and blockchain-based payment systems.

Morph is a blockchain-based settlement network focused on bringing stablecoin payments into mainstream commerce. The company is building a payments-first infrastructure layer designed to support merchant settlement, remittances, payroll, treasury management, B2B payments, and cross-border transactions using onchain settlement rails. Morph emphasizes fast transaction finality, low fees, and scalable payment infrastructure, positioning itself as a settlement layer for global payments rather than a traditional cryptocurrency platform. The network supports a growing ecosystem of payment providers, wallets, and financial applications, while initiatives such as its $150 million Payment Accelerator are aimed at helping businesses bring real-world payment activity onchain.

You spent more than two decades building payment infrastructure at organizations including Mastercard, JPMorgan, and Citi before joining Morph. Having seen multiple waves of payments innovation firsthand, what convinced you that agentic commerce and stablecoin settlement represent a genuinely new category rather than simply another payments trend?

I have seen a lot of payments innovation over the years, but most of it was about making existing payment experiences faster, cheaper, or more digital. Cards moved online. Bank transfers became more real time. Wallets made checkout easier.

Agentic commerce feels different because the buyer itself is changing. We are moving from a world where humans search, compare, decide, and pay, to a world where AI agents can increasingly participate in that flow on behalf of the user.

That changes the infrastructure requirements. If agents are going to transact across platforms, currencies, markets, and merchants, the payment layer needs to be more programmable, always available, and easier to settle across borders. That is where stablecoins become interesting. They are not just another payment method. They can become the settlement layer for a more automated, machine-driven commerce environment.

For me, the reason this feels like a new category is that agentic commerce is not only changing how people pay. It is changing who, or what, initiates the transaction.

Morph’s report predicts that agent-influenced commerce could exceed $500 billion in global GMV by 2028. What developments are you seeing today that give you confidence this forecast is achievable?

The biggest development is that AI is moving closer to the transaction itself. People are already using AI to research products, compare options, summarize reviews, and make purchase decisions. That behavior is becoming normal very quickly.

The next step is execution. Once agents can move from recommendation to action, meaning they can help complete the purchase, book the service, or trigger the payment, the addressable volume grows very fast.

The other important point is that this does not need to start with fully autonomous agents making complex decisions. It can start with simple, high-frequency use cases: reordering products, booking travel, comparing prices, managing subscriptions, paying invoices, or optimizing business purchases.

When you combine better AI interfaces with programmable payment infrastructure and stablecoin settlement, you start to see why the market could scale quickly. The user experience gets simpler, but the infrastructure behind it becomes much more powerful.

The report argues that AI agents are evolving from assistants into autonomous buyers capable of discovering products, comparing prices, negotiating terms, and completing transactions. What is the most important breakthrough that has made this possible now?

AI has been able to find products and compare options for a while. The missing piece was always execution.

The real breakthrough now is that the ecosystem is starting to build the rails that allow agents to move from advice to action. That means authorization, checkout, payment, settlement, and merchant acceptance.

In payments, that distinction matters. A recommendation engine can tell you what to buy. But an agentic commerce system needs to know whether it is allowed to buy, how to pay, where to route the transaction, and how the merchant gets settled.

So the breakthrough is not only the AI model. It is the combination of AI, identity, permissions, and payment infrastructure coming together. That is what allows agents to become actual participants in commerce rather than just assistants on the side.

One of the report’s central themes is that stablecoins could become the native payment rail for AI agents. Why are stablecoins particularly well-suited for machine-to-machine commerce compared to traditional payment networks?

Traditional payment networks were built mainly for people making purchases. They work very well for many use cases, and they are not going away.

But AI agents could create a very different transaction environment. They may initiate many more small, automated, cross-border, or API-driven transactions. At that scale, speed, cost, availability, and programmability become much more important.

Stablecoins are well suited for that because they can move 24/7, settle quickly, work across borders, and be embedded directly into software flows. They are also more naturally programmable than many traditional rails.

The way I think about it is simple: cards and bank payments were built around human commerce. Stablecoins are better suited for software-driven commerce. If agents begin buying, paying, and settling on behalf of users or businesses, they will need payment infrastructure that behaves more like the internet itself.

The report cites $67 billion in AI-influenced spending during Cyber Week 2025 and a 693% increase in generative AI-driven retail traffic. Are these early indicators of a fundamental shift in consumer behavior, or are we still in the experimentation phase?

I think the shift is real, but the market is still early.

Consumers are already using AI to influence buying decisions. They use it to research products, compare options, understand reviews, and narrow down choices. That is already a meaningful change in behavior.

What is still experimental is how much control consumers are willing to delegate. Today, many people are comfortable asking AI for recommendations. The bigger shift happens when they become comfortable letting AI complete routine purchases, manage preferences, or optimize decisions on their behalf.

Once that trust develops, adoption could move faster than expected. We have seen this before in payments. At first, people hesitate to use a new behavior. Then, once the experience becomes convenient and trusted, it becomes normal very quickly.

Several predictions suggest that AI agents will dramatically increase price transparency and comparison shopping. If agents can evaluate thousands of options instantly, what happens to brand loyalty and pricing power?

I do not think brand loyalty disappears. Strong brands are shortcuts for trust, and trust becomes even more important when a consumer delegates part of the decision to an agent.

What changes is the basis of competition. Agents will not respond to branding in the same emotional way humans do. They will look at evidence: price, quality, reviews, delivery reliability, return rates, customer satisfaction, and whether the product matches the user’s actual preferences.

So brands will still matter, but they will need to prove their value in a more measurable way.

In some categories, price transparency will put pressure on margins. But in other categories, trusted brands may become even stronger because agents will favor reliability and lower risk. The winners will be brands that combine trust, performance, and clear data that agents can understand.

Morph positions itself as infrastructure for the emerging agentic economy. As enterprises begin experimenting with AI-driven commerce, what role do you see Morph playing in helping businesses move from pilot projects to real-world deployment?

I think Morph’s role is to help businesses become ready for agentic commerce from the payment side.

A lot of the conversation around AI agents focuses on discovery and recommendations, but at some point the agent needs to actually transact. That is where the infrastructure question becomes real: how is the payment initiated, how is it authorized, and how does the merchant receive settlement?

That is where Morph is focused. We are not trying to own the full agent discovery layer or the merchant catalog experience. Our focus is the stablecoin payment and settlement layer behind the transaction.

For businesses, that means they can prepare for agent-driven commerce without becoming crypto infrastructure experts. Whether the transaction starts from an agent, a wallet, or another commerce interface, the goal is to make the payment and settlement experience simple, reliable, and ready to scale.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more can visit Morph or download Morph’s Agentic Economy Report.