TLDR: Agentic commerce, where AI agents autonomously manage and execute financial transactions, is poised to revolutionize retail payments. Industry leaders like Mastercard, Visa, and Stripe are investing heavily in this shift, leveraging APIs and advanced identity solutions. While offering unprecedented convenience, this new paradigm also necessitates robust frameworks for digital identity and fraud prevention to ensure secure and trustworthy transactions.
The financial services landscape is on the cusp of a profound transformation driven by the emergence of ‘agentic commerce,’ a paradigm where artificial intelligence agents autonomously handle payments, manage finances, and execute transactions on behalf of users. This significant shift was a central theme at the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference in Berlin, where Simon Redfern of the Open Banking Project delivered a compelling presentation on ‘Disrupting Payments with Autonomous Agents and APIs.’ Redfern emphasized the huge impact this will have on the retail payments sector, asserting that full agentic commerce is not a distant future, despite current AI model limitations .
Redfern identified three primary categories of impact that agents will exert on retail financial services: management, optimization, and execution . ‘Management’ encompasses data analysis for insights, handling bills and subscriptions, and overseeing financial health, such as savings plans. ‘Optimisation’ focuses on identifying the best deals, selecting payment methods based on fees and rates, obtaining rewards, and scheduling payments. ‘Execution’ involves making bookings, acquiring tickets, managing subscriptions, tracking prices, and executing purchases at optimal moments, including applying promotional codes and loyalty points .
While some observers express skepticism about consumers entrusting purchasing power to AI, proponents argue that a significant portion of the population already relies on agents for various critical functions, from therapy to investment advice, making the leap to payment execution a natural progression .
The fintech sector is actively responding to this impending shift. Major players are already making strategic moves: Mastercard’s ‘Agent Pay’ initiative aims to simplify and secure AI-driven payments through tokenization and ‘Agentic Tokens’ . Visa’s ‘Intelligent Commerce’ offers a suite of integrated APIs and a commercial partner program to connect developers with consumers via AI, utilizing ‘AI-ready cards’ with spending limits and robust security measures like FIDO and passkeys . Stripe is particularly aggressive in embracing this change, with acquisitions like Bridge (for stablecoin payment capabilities) and Privy (for embedded wallet infrastructure), building programmable, borderless finances delivered through APIs . Coinbase’s x402 approach and platforms like PayOS, which provides a wallet and payment engine tailored for AI, further underscore the industry’s commitment to this new frontier . PayOS, for instance, partners with Mastercard and Visa to offer AI developers direct, global access to leading payment networks .
A critical component of agentic commerce is digital identity. The ‘ABCs of digital identity’ – Know-your-Agent, Know-your-Business, and Know-your-Customer – are paramount for financial services organizations seeking to capitalize on this shift . The need to identify agents, whether for network registration or other purposes, presents significant growth opportunities in the digital identity space. Experts, including venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, advocate for agents to possess a single, portable ‘passport’ .
However, this evolution also introduces new challenges, particularly concerning security, identity validation, and fraud prevention. Traditional fraud detection systems, designed for human behaviors, require a complete rethinking to address AI agents acting on behalf of humans . The shift to ‘agentic checkout,’ as highlighted by Google’s I/O 2025 conference, raises fundamental questions about who validates identity, handles fraud, and owns risk and consent when an AI agent initiates a purchase . Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are positioned to play a crucial role in this new ecosystem due to their regulatory obligation to ‘know your customer’ and their ability to support robust multifactor authentication solutions. With fraud and cybercrime projected to cost organizations $5.2 trillion globally by the end of 2025, MNOs’ ability to validate identity against mobile phone numbers becomes a vital security layer . Solutions like Sekura.id’s adaptive APIs are designed to provide real-time signals, detect fraud, and meet agentic checkout compliance needs, emphasizing that if the future of checkout is AI-first, the identity layer must be mobile-first .
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Ultimately, agentic commerce promises an incredibly convenient and deeply personalized shopping experience, potentially disrupting businesses by boosting sales through highly efficient and tailored interactions . This new frontier for payments, where machine-to-machine and automated payments intersect with advanced AI, necessitates a strategic response from the payments sector to meet the emerging demand for robot-to-robot (R2R) payments and create new products and services, with the ‘smart wallet’ emerging as a central orchestration mechanism .
