Welcome to the Agentic Era: Key Insights from the Liberis x Google Partner Event

Last week, Liberis and Google hosted a partner event at Google’s London HQ to explore the future of embedded finance, AI, and the next evolution in contextual business finance. This wasn’t your typical industry update. It was a high-energy day of real-world demos, radical clarity, and bold perspectives on how fintech is shifting fast. Over several sessions, we unpacked the future of finance from every angle: intelligent capital, embedded payments, AI underwriting, platform transformation, and what it truly means to build in the Agentic Era. Here’s what we learned.

Liberis has undergone a period of rapid acceleration over the past 18 months. We launched 106 product features, almost doubled our partnerships to 50, and expanded our reach to 16 countries across Europe and North America. Monthly, we analyse over 2.2 million merchants through our platform, enabling faster, fairer access to capital that aligns with how small businesses actually operate. This growth isn’t just scale for scale’s sake. It reflects a deeper trend: the needs of small businesses are evolving faster than traditional finance can keep up with. Global instability, rising operating costs, and tightening regulations are making it harder than ever for SMBs to access the working capital they need. In fact, most businesses now rely on between five and eight funding products throughout their lifecycle. Yet the experience is still fragmented, repetitive, and filled with unnecessary friction. Traditional lenders haven’t fully caught up. And that gap, between what’s needed and what’s delivered, is where Liberis and our partners are building.

The first major focus of the event was how embedded finance can move from static to smart, offering capital that flexes with a business’s real-time performance. The Liberis Capital Platform is our response to that challenge. Instead of relying on out-of-date credit scores or rigid eligibility rules, the platform processes thousands of live data signals, everything from revenue cycles and transaction volume to seasonality and growth stage, to make instant, intelligent funding decisions. This is essential. Nearly 40% of small businesses see major performance shifts each quarter. Traditional underwriting penalises these fluctuations, often misclassifying viable businesses as high risk. With Liberis’ AI-driven models, we adapt to these changes, delivering offers that are dynamic, relevant, and truly personalised. This smarter, more responsive capital drives real results:

• Funded merchants are 25% more likely to grow
• 76% return for additional rounds
• Partners benefit from higher LTV and deeper merchant engagement

These aren’t product upgrades. They’re structural improvements to how small business finance is delivered at scale.

The second big theme was the emergence of contextual finance — the idea that funding should appear at the exact moment it’s needed, not as a separate, time-consuming application process. That’s what led us to launch Pay with Liberis. This embedded finance product allows merchants to fund purchases at the point of transaction, directly inside a partner platform. Rather than applying for capital in a separate flow, they simply select “Pay with Liberis” at checkout, and we take care of the rest, funding the purchase and setting up a flexible repayment plan tied to future revenue. This model is ideal for small businesses making essential purchases, like new point-of-sale terminals or software tools. Traditional lenders don’t meet this need well; approvals are slow, rigid, and often miss the urgency of the moment. The early results speak for themselves:

• Platforms offering checkout finance see a 14% increase in conversions for large-ticket items
• Merchants receive flexible repayment terms that adapt to revenue
• Partners create stickier, more valuable customer experiences

Where consumer BNPL products fall short for business use, Pay with Liberis fills the gap, with scale, intelligence, and flexibility built in.

We then turned the spotlight to one of the most powerful developments in Liberis’ platform: Ada, our in-house AI credit decisioning agent. Underwriting has long been a bottleneck in the lending journey, particularly for high-value or complex applications. Traditionally, these cases required underwriters to manually review documents, assess risk factors, and validate eligibility, a process that could take hours, even days. Ada changes that. Powered by Google’s Gemini model and trained on thousands of historical Liberis deals, Ada is already transforming how we process decisions:

• By reviewing complex documentation in minutes
• Surfaces risk signals and eligibility data with full traceability
• Supports underwriters with clear reasoning and clickable data trails
• Continuously learns from every decision and human override

Since launching in production, Ada has delivered over 68% alignment with final human decisions, and growing. Underwriters now spend significantly less time on document review and more time on higher-order analysis. Approval decisions are more consistent. Risk is clearer. And customers get answers faster. Importantly, Ada doesn’t operate in a black box. Every decision can be audited, explained, and improved. This is AI designed not just for speed, but for trust.

The event also featured a keynote from Google Cloud, offering a view into the broader AI landscape and where it’s heading next. According to Google, the pace of adoption is only accelerating:

• 85% of financial institutions will have adopted AI by the end of the year
• 75% are already reporting cost savings up to 83%
• 70% cite improved customer experiences as a result of AI deployment

But it’s not evenly distributed. While half of fintechs are running 12 or more AI use cases, another quarter are stuck in early testing phases, often held back by unclear regulation and immature governance frameworks. Google’s solution? Systems that are:

• Grounded — validating their output in real-time using enterprise data or Google Search
• Explainable — providing clear reasoning for every decision made
• Actionable — capable of completing tasks and initiating workflows autonomously

With models like Gemini and tools like Vertex AI, businesses can deploy AI systems that aren’t just reactive assistants, but fully agentic, reasoning systems that plan, adapt, and deliver results at scale.

To close the day, we hosted a panel featuring Rob Straathof (Liberis), Camille Rougie (Plural.AI), and Sufyaan Kazi (Google), moderated by Bella Renney-Thwaites. The discussion was honest, sharp, and full of practical wisdom for anyone building with AI today. We’re already in the Agentic Era AI is no longer a back-office tool; it’s operating at the core of real business processes. Liberis has kept headcount flat at ~240 people since 2021, but grown revenue nearly 10x. That’s not just automation, that’s operational leverage driven by agentic systems. But maturity is uneven Only 11% of fintech leaders feel confident in their responsible AI frameworks. Regulation, risk, and data governance remain major blockers, especially in Europe. The winners will be the ones who build transparency and oversight into their AI from day one. Not every use case needs generative AI Camille Rougie reminded the room that not all problems need large language models. In many workflows, a simple deterministic system is more reliable and more secure. Knowing when not to use GenAI is just as important as knowing where it can shine. The real value lies in memory and explainability Agentic AI isn’t about speed alone — it’s about systems that learn from past interactions and apply that memory to future decisions. Both Google and Liberis are focused on building explainable systems that offer transparency, auditability, and accountability. Co-pilots are coming for SMBs Rob laid out a bold vision: what if every small business had its own AI CFO, CMO, and COO — embedded inside a partner platform? Systems that help merchants negotiate funding terms, optimise costs, and manage marketing budgets. Not someday. Soon.

The Agentic Era is no longer a concept. It’s operational. It’s measurable. And it’s reshaping fintech in real time. At Liberis, we’re not chasing the next shiny trend. We’re building platforms that remove friction, increase relevance, and deliver real value for partners and the small businesses they serve. Here’s where we’re focused:

• Smarter capital journeys through the Liberis Capital Platform
• Seamless embedded payments via Pay with Liberis
• AI-driven decisioning with Ada, our underwriter
• Deep collaboration with Google Cloud and partners like Plural.AI

This event was just the beginning. What comes next will define how embedded finance evolves, how AI serves people more fairly, and how platforms turn intelligence into impact. We’re ready. And if you’re reading this, you probably are too.