- Key insight: Cards are the major payment method for agentic commerce, but that will change as usage of the technology grows.
- What's at stake: Not supporting local payments, such as digital wallets and account-to-account payments, will stymie the market's growth potential.
- Forward look: There are still technology challenges, including authentication, since most payment systems were designed for human users.
As
Total agentic commerce transaction value is expected to be $8 billion in 2026, growing to $3.5 trillion in 2031, according to
Here's what banks need to know about developments in agentic commerce payments:
Various shopping pilots are underway
Very early solutions require some clicks to get to checkout, meaning agentic commerce is not yet fully autonomous. Consumer trust, tokenization and technology all need to evolve to get to a fully automated process, Reshmi Suresh, head of agentic commerce at Global Payments, told American Banker.
The timeline depends partly on pilots. Microsoft, Google, ChatGPT and Amazon, for instance, are running tests with a handful of merchants. Microsoft Copilot Checkout
"Making sure the agent is doing a good job and people are getting value is the first step," Suresh said.
Cards have an early mover advantage — for now
Visa and Mastercard have been looking for anything to cement cards' role in e-commerce, investing heavily in agentic commerce. "They've been very, very involved because they see a big opportunity there," Nick Maynard, vice president of research at Juniper, told American Banker. Card brands have been getting in early "to have a significant early mover advantage."
However, Maynard said he expects other payment methods to be offered, possibly over the next 18 months or so, as more agentic commerce transactions occur. "People pay the way they want to pay. They don't pay the way merchants want them to pay or the way banks necessarily want them to pay," Maynard told American Banker.
For instance, Juniper's consumer payment tech
Available payment methods could differ by country
Payment options for agentic commerce could vary by country and the security restrictions placed on card-not-present transactions, Itai Sela, board chair for the Secure Technology Alliance, told American Banker. Swedes, for example, use BankID to prove their identity online and sign documents legally. In Europe, 3D Secure is the primary authentication protocol used to comply with strong customer authentication mandates, said Sela, president and chief executive of B2 Payment Solutions. The U.S. doesn't have these types of requirements, he noted.
New examples of card issuance continue to be announced
Earlier this month, Cross River Bank said it was expanding its partnership with Stripe to help power Stripe's card issuing capabilities for agentic commerce. The arrangement allows businesses to offer a secure, compliant way for agents to pay with cards on behalf of verified users.
"Consumers and businesses are increasingly relying on agents to act on their behalf, but the payments infrastructure hasn't kept pace," said Gilles Gade, founder and chief executive of Cross River, in a
When an AI agent needs to make a purchase,
Still the Wild West
The market is still in the early days of building a framework for agentic payments broadly.
"The rails were not designed for agentic commerce," Sela, of the Secure Technology Alliance, told American Banker. "They were designed for a human doing a transaction with a card." There are still a lot of challenges, even with regular credit cards, including two-factor authentication — the same way a human may be stopped from completing a purchase. "We're not even there yet with card payments," he said.
Approaches to agentic payments remain fragmented, and regulatory guidance is murky, according to a
People need to know their money and transactions are safe. "We don't know today who is responsible for what," Sima Gandhi, senior advisor at strategic consulting firm FS Vector and co-founder of CFES, told American Banker. "We have to build the right trust frameworks around these different payments."
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Today, if a card owner gives her credit card to her nanny to buy groceries and the nanny uses it in the Bahamas, the responsibility falls on the card owner. What if a consumer gives permission to an agent to buy paper towels and the agent buys a trip to the Bahamas? Or what if that agent buys a year's worth of scratchy brown paper towels because it knows the person likes a deal? "We need clarity as an industry about who is responsible," Gandhi told American Banker.
Ambiguities are slowing adoption of autonomous agentic commerce overall, she added. "Folks want to understand the rules of the road."
Consumers still aren't on board
The future of autonomous agentic commerce relies heavily on consumer trust, according to Nikhil Lele, who leads EY's banking and capital markets consulting business in the Americas. EY research shows that many consumers are hesitant to empower agents for their financial transactions. "Consumers aren't really demanding it yet, and that's what's going to take time to evolve," he told American Banker.
