SBC Summit 2026 ran from September 29 to October 1 in Lisbon at Feira Internacional de Lisboa (FIL) and MEO Arena, drawing 40,000 attendees from across the gaming and payments industry, and 800 sponsors and exhibitors, including Akurateco.
Akurateco’s team, Co-founder Andrew Riabchuk, COO and co-founder Alexandra Dolia, CCO Anastasiia Brener, and Business Development Manager Nazar Zimerman, ran live demos at booth E323.
SBC Summit 2026: Anastasiia Brener on Declines, AI Agents and Smart ID
On day two of SBC Summit 2026 in Lisbon, Anastasiia Brener, CCO at Akurateco, gave an interview with Ace Alliance explaining how smart routing and cascading help win back declined payments.
Anastasiia also announced that Akurateco launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI coding agents handle merchant integrations. The team also added more merchant plug-in (MPI) providers for 3D Secure (3DS) and released a new version of Smart ID. And the platform has 700+ integrations, with more on the way in Latin America and Africa.
Listen to the interview
Key Takeaways
- A PSP doesn’t need a big engineering team. It can run a white-label platform under its own brand and compete on service and level of technology. Its merchants switch on a new country or payment method from the dashboard, with no development. After a tough 2026 for iGaming and fintech, Anastasiia advises keeping more payment options in reserve.
- Smart routing and cascading go after declines. Smart routing sends each payment where it has the best chance of approval at that moment. Rules can weigh approval rate, price, the card’s issuer and country, even the time of day. Cascading then retries a declined payment through the next route.
- Merchants can hand integrations to their AI agents. Akurateco’s MCP server gives AI coding agents access to its current API documentation. The merchant’s own agent can then do the integration, so it doesn’t sit in the sprint queue.
- Smart ID builds rules around the payer. It recognizes a payer by device fingerprint, card, IP address, and geolocation, so rules can act on that payer’s history. High-value players can go to the fastest route or a 3DS flow that requests no challenge. Akurateco also added more MPI providers, picked for their approval rates.
- More APMs are coming in Latin America and Africa. Akurateco’s 700+ integrations already cover acquirers, alternative payment methods (APMs), wallets, and crypto. Next on the roadmap are more local payment methods in Latin America and Africa.
