The Big Bets | David Birch and Alessandro Hatami with Paulette Rowe

In this episode of ‪@The-Big-Bets‬ podcast, hosts David Birch and Alessandro Hatami sit down with Paulette Rowe, former CEO of Stax and Paysafe, who's also held senior roles at Facebook, Barclaycard, and RBS. The show's format has guests reflect on two bets: the one that made their career, and one they're making now. Rowe walks through her jump from banking into payments at Barclaycard around 2012 (right as contactless was taking off), her stint at Facebook during its commerce and Libra push, and her later moves into PE-backed payments firms. Most of the conversation digs into how AI is upending both payments and the private equity playbook. They talk about why PE firms are so hungry for payments companies right now (the data is gold for AI and embedded finance), whether old-school PE strategy can keep up with how fast AI moves, and how "agentic commerce" — AI agents doing the shopping and choosing where to spend — could blow up things like credit card rewards programs entirely. They wrap up on payments as critical infrastructure: resilience in a messier geopolitical world, alternatives like stablecoins and Europe's push for payment sovereignty, fraud as a real threat to trust in the system, and the still-open question of who's actually going to regulate AI in finance.