Commerce is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty. Not because of a new payment rail or a faster checkout flow. The real shift is more fundamental: the question, “Who is transacting?”, is being asked in an entirely new way. Today, Wink is proud to welcome two of the most seasoned minds in payments and financial services as strategic advisors: Tim Sherwin and Souheil Badran.

The Challenge Of The New Era Of Commerce: The Invisible Buyer

Agentic Commerce is here, and AI agents are already comparing prices, filling carts, and in some cases completing purchases on behalf of people who may never touch a keyboard or tap a screen during the transaction. Agentic commerce is no longer a future scenario. It’s an emerging reality, and it’s arriving faster than the payments industry is prepared for.

This creates a genuinely new problem at the intersection of identity, ethics, and trust. When an agent presents a credential at the point of commerce, how does a merchant know there’s an authorized human behind it? When AI acts on someone’s behalf, who bears responsibility if something goes wrong? How do we ensure that the technology meant to serve people doesn’t become a vector for fraud, unauthorized spend, or the quiet erosion of consumer agency?

These are not edge cases. They are the central design questions of this new era of commerce, and they cannot be answered with tokens, passwords, or behavioral heuristics alone. The only durable answer is one that keeps a verified human at the center of every transaction, regardless of how that transaction is initiated.

Tim and Souheil represent exactly the kind of experience and perspective that accelerates what we're building. Between them, they've seen every side of this industry — from building the authentication infrastructure that digital commerce runs on, to operating some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Having them in our corner as we define the identity layer for the next era of commerce is something we don't take lightly."

— Deepak Jain, Founder & CEO, Wink

Wink’s position is unambiguous: biometric identity is the trust layer that makes agentic commerce safe, ethical, and accountable. Wink is designed to be the bridge between a verified human and their digital commerce presence — spanning payments, age and ID verification, and loyalty recognition — whether they're transacting in person, online, or authorizing an AI agent to act on their behalf. We’ve already joined the Agentic Commerce Consortium, led by Basis Theory, to help define the standards and infrastructure that will govern this space. Tim and Souheil bring exactly the depth of experience needed to lead that work and to ensure that as commerce becomes more autonomous, it never becomes less human.  

Extending Into The Real World

Agentic commerce needs a foundation to run on — and Wink is already building it. Through deep integrations with leading POS hardware providers including Fiserv/Clover, Elo (a Zebra Technologies company), PAX, and Sunmi, WinkID is embedded in the ecosystems that power retail, hospitality, and financial services today. Merchants on existing terminal infrastructure can activate Wink without a rip-and-replace, making it the single platform for payment authentication, age and ID verification, and loyalty recognition across every channel they already operate.

The same biometric identity that works at a Clover terminal works online, in-app, and as the authorization layer behind an AI agent. One enrollment. One verified human. Every context.

The Authenticator: Tim Sherwin

For over two decades, Tim and his team at CardinalCommerce tackled one of digital commerce's hardest problems: how do you authenticate the person behind an online transaction without constantly interrupting the experience? Cardinal became a leading provider of 3-D Secure services, building products for both merchants and issuers, and later refined the protocols through risk-based authentication. By sharing richer data signals between merchants and issuers, CardinalCommerce helped enable confident authentication decisions that happen invisibly in the background, reducing unnecessary friction for hundreds of millions of transactions.

When Visa acquired CardinalCommerce in 2017, it was a recognition that authentication infrastructure wasn't a commodity — it was strategic. Tim continued to lead Cardinal as CEO as a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa, growing the company an additional five-fold to over $200M in revenue — demonstrating his expertise in scaling authentication infrastructure globally.

That same conviction is at the core of what Wink is building: a world where identity is the foundation of every transaction, not an afterthought bolted on top.

The Operator: Souheil Badran

Souheil Badran is a retired financial services and technology executive with more than three decades of leadership across banking, payments, security, and fintech. He served as Chief Operations Officer of US Bancorp, COO of Northwestern Mutual, and President of Alipay Americas at Ant Financial. He brings experience in regulation, risk management, automation, AI, with global financial platforms.

He began his career at M&I Data Services before moving through Metavante and Digital Insight, then into VeriSign, where a nearly seven-year tenure as VP & GM shaped a deep perspective on identity, security, and global infrastructure. He then led major divisions at First Data, Digital River, and Edo Interactive before becoming President of Alipay Americas, where he brought the world's largest third-party payment platform to merchants across North and South America.

He joined Northwestern Mutual in 2019 first as Chief Innovation Officer, then as EVP & COO, before becoming SEVP & COO of U.S. Bank in late 2022. What that arc represents is rare: a leader who has seen every side of the financial services stack (the issuer, the platform, the innovator, and the operator) and who has been inside institutions large enough to understand exactly what it takes for a new identity layer to earn genuine institutional trust.

Recipe for Success

Tim and Souheil know better than anyone what it takes to turn that kind of deployment into a category-defining platform. We’re building a world where every transaction, whether initiated by a person or an agent acting on their behalf, begins with a verified human identity. Consented. Accountable. In control.

The future of commerce is authenticated. We’re building it.

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