EMVCo (the technical body behind Visa, Mastercard, Amex) is creating global standards for "agentic payments." Biggest change in "cards" since contactless They're building the plumbing so AI agents can actually spend money universally. --- Right now, AI agents are phenomenal at finding things to buy. - Power users are starting to default to their research - Can compare complex options and summarize - And when people click through conversion is 2x to 5x higher But there's no agreed way for payment to happen - There's countless protocols - x402 for agents accessing other tools - ACP and A2P from Open AI and Google - Visa and Mastercard have their own approaches --- This is the XKCD standards problem playing out in real-time: "There are 14 competing standards. Let's create a universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. There are now 15 competing standards." --- EMVCo are the people who set the standards for how debit and credit cards work globally Now they're creating a "passport" for authenticated agents. Agents present a cryptographic token that proves "I'm a good bot, authorized to spend." The merchant firewall sees the signature, verifies it came from a legitimate issuer, and lets it through. --- For authentication, they're extending FIDO/SRC standards: - You authenticate once with your face to "bind" an agent to your card, - Set spending limits, - Then the agent presents a delegated token at checkout. - No 3DS challenge needed (!!!) --- This prevents the agentic commerce world fromfracturing into incompatible silos. It ensures an agent built on Microsoft/OpenAI can pay a merchant using Adyen, authenticated by an issuer on Marqeta. Critically it creates a new liability framework (!!!) If merchants use the EMV standard, issuers take fraud risk. - If they allow random bots, merchants eat the cost. --- We're about to see a new transaction category emerge: "Agent Present." - Not card-present. - Not card-not-present. - Agent-present. With its own interchange rates, its own fraud rules, its own liability shifts. The networks are moving from "cool AI demos" to "infrastructure for autonomous commerce." Are standards boring? Absolutely. Are they critical? More than almost anything else happening in payments right now.
Unbelievable they are moving ahead with bearer tokens—shared secrets, an oxymoron there ever was one—instead of full zero trust with verifiable credentials with digital signatures. AI agents with the power to spend your money and a fragile security model… what could go wrong?
AITs (Agent-Initiated-Transactions) as a new category after CITs/MITs is imminent and the protocol solves the authentication question that hovers around scaling of agentic e-commerce, specially in the regulated markets. Will the standards also define fraud liability rules for agent present payments, or will they remain in card network controls we shall see.. (e.g. currently for CITs, some networks do not qualify certain MCCs for liability protection today even when authenticated with EMV3DS).
EMV perhaps aligns 2 of the 14 standards (V & MA), but AI agents can use any payment rail, and need to link to both tokenised payments and tokenised ID to function securely at scale. This needs EMV alignment with many other standards bodies; OIDF, FIDO, W3C, DIF etc, and certified trust services, e.g UK DIATF, EU eIDAS etc.
@scottharkey is correct. Case study in mobile contactless: EMVCo tokenization standards were announced in March 2014. Visa Token Service, MasterCard Digital Enablement and ApplePay's use of the standards to enable their initial launch of contactless in September that same year. Standards in payments matter.
Simon Taylor you’re so right that standards are boring but neccessary. Without them Applepay, Googlepay and SamsungPay, as well as contactless and being able to use your card internationally wouldn’t work. We sit at the dawn of embedded multi-rail payments fuelled by Agentic commerce which non payment geeks are going to think of as conversational instructions to their wallet/bank/trusted agent. The interoperability standards will provide the visibility of consents, the control and audit trails to identify malfeasant players and safeguard trust for consumers. Exciting - frightening and seismic in the collective. You gotta love standards for what they will enable, protect and support.
Erez Almog I expect AI agents will soon become experts in first-person fraud and perfectly understand both chargeback rules and consumer protection laws. They will be buying lots of stuff, then claiming it didn’t arrive, and disputing any photos of stuff on doorsteps with a closed door, as it isn’t proof of delivery.
Fascinating development! EMVCo's work on agentic payments standards is exactly what we need as AI agents become more embedded in financial transactions. The shift from human-controlled to agent-initiated payments will require robust security frameworks and standardization. This could fundamentally change how we think about payment flows, authentication, and fraud prevention in an AI-first economy.
EMVCo solves one hop: the agent proving it’s allowed to spend. That helps with fraud and merchant firewalling, and it will improve conversion. No disagreement there. But the hard problems in agentic commerce are not: – payment tokens – firewall whitelists – delegated authentication The hard problems are: – intent (did the user mean this?) – liability when the agent acts incorrectly – multi-party coordination – corridor legality across jurisdictions – cross-sector compliance – evidence and replay when something goes wrong – SME discoverability without platform mediation – linking actions to EU wallet identity without leaking it to global schemes – preventing U.S. extraterritorial warrants from reaching EU user data – avoiding private capture of routing A payment token cannot solve any of those. EMVCo’s work is necessary, but it cannot be the foundation for European agentic commerce — because it is still anchored in global card-scheme rules, not in sovereign legality, selective-disclosure identity or verifiable evidence. A true agentic economy needs a sovereign routing substrate above payments: interoperability, yes — but also auditability, legality, identity-minimalism, and fair SME access.
This is the shift everyone has been waiting for. Agents were never blocked by intent or logic. They were blocked by the rails. A universal EMVCo standard changes the equation because it gives agents a real identity and merchants a predictable trust model. Once capital, auth and settlement live in the same flow you finally get true agentic commerce instead of isolated demos. Agent present is going to become a real category much faster than most people expect.
TL:DR; who authenticates the agents (issuers?) and where do the agents store their private keys