Agentic commerce

Payment rails, protocols and the question they all leave open.

AP2 under FIDO governance: what it means for merchants

The Agent Payments Protocol was handed over to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026; version 0.2 allows autonomous transactions based on pre-authorised instructions for the first time, through human-not-present payments. For merchants this means: payment authorisation becomes standard — authorisation of the action remains their job.

Visa TAP and Mastercard Agent Pay compared

Both card networks rolled out agent frameworks in 2025/26: Visa with the Trusted Agent Protocol (verified agent ID plus issuer-signed consent), Mastercard with Agentic Tokens (an MDES extension bound to agent, merchant scope and policy) — available to all US cardholders since November 2025, with a global rollout.

Stripe for agents: ACP, Shared Payment Tokens, MPP

Stripe occupies the developer layer of agentic commerce: the Agentic Commerce Protocol developed with OpenAI, Shared Payment Tokens (merchant- and amount-bound, time-limited, single-use) and the Machine Payments Protocol — shipped as GA, with Klarna and Affirm rolling out.

Human not present: autonomous payments and their limit

With AP2 v0.2, agents may execute payments autonomously — based on pre-authorised instructions, without the human being present at the moment of the transaction. This is the moment at which payment authorisation effectively becomes delegation of action.

Agent-ready checkout: the reference architecture

An agent-ready checkout consists of three layers: recognition (a legitimate agent? — TAP/attestation), authority (was it allowed to? — mandate verify) and execution (payment — AP2/SPT/agentic token). Building only layers one and three means accepting revenue with open liability.