The Problem: Gateways Are Pipes
For twenty years, payments in software have been treated as a side project.
Platforms bolt on a gateway, ship an API, and hope merchants figure it out.
Gateways are pipes: single-channel, single-purpose. They move money, but they don’t create experiences. They lock platforms into endless integrations, support nightmares, and lost revenue.
Meanwhile, merchants churn. Developers burn months reinventing the wheel. CFOs lose patience.
The gateway era is collapsing.
The Shift: Commerce Has Changed
Commerce is no longer a static checkout at the end of a transaction.
It’s everywhere:
Invoices, links, calls, and chats.
Bookings, subscriptions, and workflows.
AI agents generating transactions dynamically in real time.
The world is moving from e-commerce to agentic commerce — where payments are created, adapted, and optimised automatically by platforms, workflows, and AI.
But gateways can’t keep up. They were built for yesterday.
The New Category: The Payments Layer
What the world needs now isn’t another gateway.
It’s a layer — a foundation above PSPs and rails that:
Unifies access to 40+ PSPs globally.
Governs compliance, policy, and routing.
Provides ready-made components: links, voice, agentic checkouts.
Integrates natively into workflows, platforms, and AI agents.
This is The Payments Layer:
The infrastructure that lets platforms, merchants, and AI agents build payment experiences instantly and compliantly.
The easy on ramp: Link Checkout
Every new category needs an obvious first proof. For us, it’s Link Checkout.
The simplest way for a platform to give its merchants modern payments — no code, no integration debt, live in days.
But Link Checkout is just the beginning.
Voice checkouts, AI-generated payment links, automated invoice flows — all are natural extensions of The Payments Layer.
The Enemy: The Old Way
Gateways are pipes.
Orchestration is narrow.
Marketplaces confuse.
All of them keep platforms in the plumbing business instead of letting them own the payments experience.
The enemy is integration debt, churn, and lost revenue.
The Call: Build on The Payments Layer
Platforms that cling to the gateway model will lose merchants to competitors who can deliver instant, global, agentic payments.
Platforms that embrace The Payments Layer will own the future:
Faster onboarding.
More revenue per merchant.
Payments that adapt to any channel, any workflow, any AI.
This is the moment.
The shift from Gateways to Agentic Commerce is underway.
And Shuttle is leading it.
