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Agentic Payments

“Agentic commerce is moving quickly from concept to reality. The challenge now is ensuring payments infrastructure and governance can keep pace.”

“Agentic payments have the potential to transform how people and businesses manage money.”

Benjamin David Head of Intelligence, The Payments Association

Janine Hirt CEO, Innovate Finance

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Agentic commerce is outrunning the rules Agentic commerce is moving quickly from concept to reality. The challenge now is ensuring payments infrastructure and governance can keep pace.

A WRITTEN BY Benjamin David Head of Intelligence, The Payments Association

I agents may already be buying from UK merchants. The payments industry is still working out who is responsible when they do. Research from The Payments Association found that 58% of UK online merchants believe AI agents have already transacted on their platforms. Yet, only 41% are very confident in the liability frameworks surrounding those transactions. This is no longer just an emerging technology question. Meanwhile, 72% of merchants are actively preparing or planning for agentic commerce. The market is moving from experimentation towards implementation, while some of the rules needed to support it remain unsettled. That changes the nature of the conversation for payments leaders. The immediate challenge is not simply how AI agents might reshape the customer journey, but whether existing payments infrastructure can recognise, authenticate and govern transactions initiated on a customer’s behalf. Who carries the risk? That uncertainty becomes more consequential when an agent moves from recommending a purchase to making one. Authentication was cited as a top concern by 32% of merchants in our research. If an agent makes a purchase outside the parameters set by its user, who is responsible? How does a merchant know that the agent has permission to make the transaction in

the first place? And what evidence of that authority should exist if the payment is later disputed? Proving an agent’s authority Answering those liability questions starts with proving that an agent had permission to make the transaction. Merchants and payments providers need to know which agent they are dealing with, on whose behalf it is acting and the limits of the authority it has been given. But proving authority consistently will require interoperability. Card schemes and technology providers are developing different approaches to agent authentication and intent verification. Merchants may have to navigate several models before common standards emerge. Don’t wait for consensus Merchants do not need to wait for those standards to settle before preparing. Payments teams can start by examining whether existing fraud and authentication controls can identify agent activity. They should also establish who internally owns decisions about agentic transactions and ask PSPs and acquirers how their infrastructure is evolving. Agentic commerce will not wait for the payments industry to resolve every question of liability, authentication and interoperability. Merchants are already preparing. The infrastructure that supports them now needs to catch up.

Landmark edition shapes the future of finance Event showcases production-ready AI, agentic payments, stablecoin infrastructure and strong regulator engagement — signalling that finance has moved from experimentation to real-world deployment.

M WRITTEN BY Bryony Naylor VP, Europe, Money20/20

oney20/20 Europe 2026 marked a turning point for the global financial ecosystem. This year wasn’t defined by hype or speculation; it was defined by production ready innovation, regulatory alignment and a commitment to building the next era of financial services. The industry’s centre of gravity has shifted AI, digital assets, payments infrastructure and regulation weren’t discussed as abstract concepts; they were debated as systems already being deployed. We are no longer asking if these technologies will

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reshape finance; we are asking how fast, safely and at what scale. Four themes dominated the show Autonomous AI and the rise of the Agentic Age, as demonstrated by the unveiling of Europe’s first production ready agentic payments flow by Worldline, Mastercard and ING. The Great ‘Rebundling’ highlighted how financial services are reorganising around intelligence, not distribution. The rewiring of the Money Stack came to life through stablecoin and settlement infrastructure announcements. Across every conversation, regulation emerged as a strategic advantage.

Regulators actively shape fintech More than 40 senior regulators, central bankers and policymakers joined closed door sessions. This year saw unprecedented regulator participation on AI governance, digital asset frameworks and cross border interoperability. The intellectual depth was reinforced by the launch of ‘The New Intersection of Money: Where TradFi and DeFi Converge’, authored by Scarlett Sieber and our global content team. The book captures the growing interoperability between traditional and decentralised systems, and the governance required to make that convergence safe. Fintech momentum builds toward 2027 Money20/20 Europe 2026 marked a turning point for the global financial ecosystem. In Amsterdam, over 7,500 attendees, 2,300 companies and 450 speakers moved the industry from exploration to execution through production-ready innovation, regulatory alignment and building the next era of financial services.

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Why the emerging world of agentic payments is a matter of trust Agentic payments present big benefits to consumers and businesses. However, it also presents very real risks.

WRITTEN BY Tony Greenway

efore this year’s World Cup, Dal Sahota, Global Director of Trusted Payments at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), saw an impressive agentic payments demonstration at a conference. “The scenario was finding tickets to watch England play, but only in certain cities, on certain days and up to a maximum price,” he remembers. AI agents benefit consumers and businesses “The AI agent took that information, searched for available games within that budget and brought back options. The consumer would then select the one they preferred, and within three clicks, the transaction and all the bookings were completed seamlessly,” explains Sahota. Agentic isn’t just making its presence felt in the consumer space. To improve efficiency and productivity, businesses are starting to use AI agents for regular supplier payments. This type of innovation feels almost inevitable, says Sahota, because AI is evolving so rapidly. “New technologies are continuously being created to benefit consumers, businesses and economies,” he points

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out. “It’s only natural that we see greater levels of adoption.” Making innovations safe and more secure There is, of course, a very large ‘however’ looming over all of this. “When innovation takes the front seat, and consumer protection is not built in from the outset, we can end up in some terrible scenarios,” emphasises Sahota.

To improve efficiency and productivity, businesses are starting to use AI agents for regular supplier payments. “The global financial crisis is a good example. New products created opportunities, but the controls and safeguards around them didn’t always evolve at the same speed. The result was a loss of trust and significant consequences for consumers and businesses alike.”

Questions surrounding trust in AI agents For agentic payments to go mainstream, users need to have faith in it. That means trusting that AI agents are not susceptible to being hacked by cybercriminals. At present, that confidence is perhaps lagging. Agents that incorporate robust authentication, verification, guard rails and cyber monitoring controls are likely to drive broader market adoption by increasing trust and reducing risk, says Sahota. Organisations are also carrying out continuous testing to ensure agents remain secure, operate within defined guardrails and can be traced to a verified source. Key questions include who created the agent and whether that creator has been authenticated as a legitimate person or trusted agent. All of this means there are ways for agentic payments to achieve consumer and business confidence. “But are safety and security ubiquitous and working hand in hand in the way we all wish to see?” asks Sahota. “I don’t think we’re quite in that space yet.”

Dal Sahota Global Director of Trusted Payments, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)

Accountability for payments made via AI agents There are other issues, too. Say you are scammed by a fraudulent AI agent. You might not just lose money on the one transaction you made with it. If it has your financial details, in a worst-case scenario, it could go rogue and begin emptying your bank account. With a non-human in the mix, will current reimbursement schemes cover payments made via agents? There are questions about who’s liable: the bank, service provider or the agent’s author? Robust controls to prevent consumer and business fraud Sahota believes regulation is a more effective “stick” in ensuring good governance and protecting consumers than broader guidance is a “carrot.” “If companies are required by law to have robust controls in place to prevent consumer and business fraud, the outcome would be very different,” he says. “That’s what we’re seeing in the EU and the UK with security checks such as Confirmation of Payee and Verification of Payee. So, I think we’re going to have more regulatory consumer-driven protection above and beyond reimbursement schemes; and that will work favourably for the market.” In the meantime, Sahota has this advice for consumers and businesses using agentic payments: “Qualify the risk you’re taking against the payments you’re making — or, rather, the decisions you are asking the agent to make on your behalf. The greater the authority you give an agent, the greater the confidence you need in its decisions.”

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How can agentic payments and trust move at the same speed? AI agents are already discovering, choosing and paying on a business’s behalf, but almost nobody can prove which one acted or on whose authority. Narrowing that gap requires more than technology, according to industry leaders. WRITTEN BY Oliver Pickup

ow far would you trust an artificial intelligence agent to spend your money without checking first? Agentic payments enable software to determine what to buy, choose a supplier and complete the payment, without a person approving each step. Agentic payments require accountability The agentic payments pitch sounds like a dream: software that can shop, negotiate and pay faster than any person. However, the potential financial nightmare is simple: without the right guardrails or parameters, an agent can overstep, and almost nobody today can say who is accountable. Agentic payments are still new enough that the outcome is not decided. Identity, authority, verification and the rails carrying the money, built properly now, are what separate the dream from the nightmare.

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The technology is live but regulation is catching up The picture right now is mixed: the technology is already live and moving real money, but trust is lagging, with good reason. Alipay’s AI Pay processed more than 120 million transactions in a single week in February 2026. Further, agentic AI is projected to deliver up to $450 billion in global economic value by 2028 through revenue growth and cost savings, according to a 2025 report by the Capgemini Research Institute.

Detection latency, kill switches and the ability to unwind a payment are as important as preauthorisation controls.

Yet, the same research showed confidence in fully autonomous AI agents fell from 43% to 27% in a year, with only 2% of organisations deploying them at scale. Regulation lags further behind in the UK. The Government’s Financial Services AI adoption plan, published in July 2026, found the UK has no definition of agent identity, no verification requirement and no operator registry. Nobody can confirm what merchants suspect Benjamin David, head of intelligence at The Payments Association (TPA), the industry’s trade body, commissioned research into what his own report calls an unresolved liability question: how many merchants believe agentic activity is already happening on their platforms, and how confident they are in the rules that would apply if something goes wrong. The report published by TPA’s Merchant Payments Working Group in March 2026, titled Agentic commerce in UK retail: an unresolved liability question, surveyed 100 senior finance and risk decision-makers at UK online retailers. It found that 58% believed AI agents had already transacted on their platforms, 72% were preparing or planning for AI agents, and only 10% ruled out agent activity.

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Yet, confidence in the frameworks surrounding that activity is significantly lower. Only 41% of merchants said they were very confident in the liability frameworks around agentic transactions. B2B agentic payments beat consumer hype Charlotte Schiøttz Hassing, head of products at Banking Circle, which settles payments for over 900 regulated financial institutions, went looking for that activity in her own data. She found nothing definitive. “We can’t find any clear indicator that points to [identify] agentic payments,” she admits. Much of the media coverage of agentic payments assumes a consumer story: an agent booking a hotel or comparing trainers. Schiøttz Hassing thinks that misses the real opportunity. A shopper’s preferences are hard for software to weigh. A business paying a repeat supplier under an existing contract has no such difficulty, which suits an agent far better. The stakes differ too. A business whose agent pays the wrong supplier answers for it publicly; an individual’s bad AI purchase rarely makes the news. Old fraud finds a new target Dal Sahota, global director of trusted payments at LSEG Risk Intelligence and a fraud specialist, has already watched agents issue refunds a human would have refused, because the decision carries judgement fixed rules cannot capture. “It’s veering outside whatever guardrails existed, or didn’t,” he says. No fraud, no breach, just software repeating a subjective call it was never designed to make. A human makes an error once. Meanwhile, an agent can repeat “the same mistake a thousand times before anyone notices,” Schiøttz Hassing says. “Detection latency, kill switches and the ability to unwind a payment are as important as pre-authorisation controls,” she adds. Fraud aimed at people does not disappear once the buyer is a machine. It moves. Sahota calls the range of exploits available to fraudsters, spanning software, human psychology and scam businesses, “exponential.” UK Finance’s latest Annual Fraud Report, published in June 2026, indicated that authorised push payment fraud losses reached £576.4 million in 2025, up 19% on the year. His organisation found 97% of victims change their behaviour afterwards. “The psychological damage is far greater than the financial loss,” he says.

is it allowed to do? He wants to fix its meaning before the industry blurs it. “KYA risks becoming one of those phrases everybody uses without necessarily agreeing what it means,” he says. “Authentication tells us who or what is acting,” he adds. “It doesn’t strictly tell us whether that action was authorised.” Knowing which agent you are dealing with means little if you cannot tell whether its owner permitted £50 or £5,000. No country has a settled answer on regulation yet. “I think it’s a bit of a

What drives a catalyst for change is organisations coming together to shape regulation in the marketplace. laggard overall at the industry level,” Sahota says of global rule-making on a technology still emerging everywhere at once. David points to India, where a framework built around the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the country’s real-time payment network, reportedly includes spending limits and identity checks. Sahota draws a sharper precedent from history: just as anti-money laundering (AML) regulation matured through successive reforms in the early 2000s, a comparable transformation will likely emerge to address agentic fraud. None of the three could agree on who should cover the loss when an agentic payment fails. The Payments Association’s survey also asked merchants who should pay if an agent completes a £2,000 purchase after being told only to research options; no answer reached even a quarter of respondents. Schiøttz Hassing expects responsibility to spread rather than settle on one link in the chain, as a purchase passes through search,

supplier choice and settlement in turn. “Liability will not rest with a single party,” she says. Counting the cost of waiting for a crisis Sahota does not think a serious agentic fraud case is far off. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he says, though he doubts one event alone forces change. “What drives a catalyst for change is organisations coming together to shape regulation in the marketplace,” he adds. David argues that preparation should come before such an event. “We shouldn’t wait for a catastrophic event to force AI regulation to catch up.” By 2029, David expects significantly more payment decisionmaking to have moved from people to software: an agent identifying a need, comparing suppliers, choosing one and paying, all inside limits set weeks earlier. “We may move from a world where a human authorises every payment to one where the human authorises the mandate,” he says. Namely: spend up to this amount, with these suppliers, for that purpose. Build controls first to avoid failure Sahota advises a cautious approach, stating which types of agentic payment are permissible. Then build the controls and testing that prove the policy is followed, the same structure many organisations use for AML compliance. “You may go a little bit slower, but you will go further,” he says. “If you go fast, you’re likely to fail.” Sahota reached for a line from Vernon Law, the American baseball pitcher: “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” Derivatives arrived before their safeguards, as did the rules against money laundering. Agentic payments are still early enough that, this time, the order could run the other way.

From the Experts

Benjamin David Head of Intelligence, The Payments Association

Charlotte Amalie Schiøttz Hassing Head of Product, Banking Circle

Dal Sahota Global Director of Trusted Payments, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)

KYA framework: identity, authority, unclear liability David argues that any Know Your Agent (KYA) framework needs to answer three questions: Which agent is this? Who does it represent? What

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Agentic payments need regulated settlement

In agentic commerce, the real winners are those whose agentic payments are embedded within strong governance, clear accountability and resilient financial controls from day one.

Paid for by Banking Circle

rtificial intelligence is moving from generating content to taking action. As agents evolve from assistants into autonomous actors that can initiate purchases, manage workflows and execute transactions, a new form of commerce is taking shape. Most of the noise is about the intelligence of the agent. While agent technology is progressing quickly, the financial infrastructure behind agent-led commerce remains the harder challenge: enabling money to move in real time, across borders, under supervision and within regulated standards. Machine-speed commerce needs machine-speed settlement Agents are not bound by business

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Charlotte Amalie Schiøttz Hassing Head of Product, Banking Circle

hours, borders or manual steps. They act when a rule triggers or a price is right, around the clock. That breaks a settlement model built on batch cycles, correspondent hops and weekends where nothing moves. The always-on, real-time settlement already becoming table stakes in payments stops being a nice-to-have the moment agents transact at scale. Trust will matter more than intelligence The technology to build agents is racing ahead. The unresolved part is governance: identity, authentication, fraud prevention, transaction controls, auditability and compliance. Institutions will not let agents near their money until they can monitor and control what those

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Agentic commerce will not scale on intelligence alone. It will depend on the infrastructure beneath it. agents do, inside established regulatory frameworks. This is the layer the current conversation is skipping, and it is the one that determines whether any of this reaches enterprise scale. Agents need financial guardrails, not just payment rails Adoption will not hinge on whether an agent can make a payment. It will hinge on whether an organisation can define who the agent may pay, under what conditions, within what limits and with full visibility and accountability. That shifts the conversation from payment initiation to payment governance, a layer that sits above execution and that regulated institutions are built to provide. Today, an agent-initiated payment can look almost identical to one initiated by a human. That is the gap. Without a clear identity and attribution layer, the controls that govern who is transacting, on whose authority and within which limits have nothing reliable to attach to. The market will settle in a mix, not a monoculture Agentic flows will run across rails, with account-to-account payments, cards and regulated digital-asset settlement coexisting rather than

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any one winning outright. The useful vantage point is the one that sees across all of them at once, because that is where the real pattern of how agentic money moves will first become visible, across both traditional and digital-asset ecosystems. Infrastructure sets the pace of adoption Agentic commerce will not scale on intelligence alone. It will depend on the infrastructure beneath it: real-time settlement, cross-border reach, multi-currency support, clear attribution, permissions, compliance controls and trusted regulated partners. The agent layer may be built in public, but the settlement layer is what will separate demonstrations from durable commerce. Where Banking Circle sits Our perspective is shaped by a vantage point across both fiat and tokenised payment flows, spanning a client base that operates in both worlds. Banking Circle’s focus is on real-time, multi-rail money movement, with digital-asset capabilities provided through Banking Circle’s authorisation as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider under MiCA offering transfer and settlement of digital assets to fiat and vice versa built within the bank’s regulated operating environment and governed by its control and risk framework, in accordance with applicable local licensing requirements. As agentic commerce evolves, the institutions best placed to understand how it scales will be those that can see autonomous transactions moving across ecosystems, rather than within a single rail or network. That is where

regulated secure infrastructure, supported by a strong operational resilience framework, becomes critical; not as a visible layer in the agent experience, but as the foundation that allows money to move, settle and remain controlled as agent-led activity grows. Any agent-led payment activity would need to operate within clearly defined mandates, authentication standards, transaction limits, AML/CTF and sanctions controls, fraud monitoring and auditability requirements, in line with local regulation. The question worth sitting with The challenge in agentic commerce is not getting machines to decide; it is letting those decisions interact safely with the financial system. Real-time, regulated settlement is becoming the baseline that autonomous commerce runs on, not a differentiator.

Adoption will not hinge on whether an agent can make a payment. The winners will not only be those building the smartest agents. They will be those whose agentic payments are embedded within strong governance, clear accountability and resilient financial controls from day one. That is the question Banking Circle believes matters most, and the one we believe is worth watching most closely as this market takes shape.

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Can Britain lead the world in agentic payments? Agentic payments – where autonomous AI agents securely make transactions on behalf of users – are the new frontier of global commerce.

S WRITTEN BY Janine Hirt CEO, Innovate Finance

ince the financial crisis, the UK has established itself as a global leader in financial services innovation. We have built an ecosystem that creates world-class fintech companies, attracts billions in investment and sets standards others follow. As artificial intelligence reshapes the economy, Britain is approaching its next defining moment. The choices we make now will determine whether the UK strengthens its leadership or cedes ground to competitors. Trust is the foundation of agentic commerce Agentic payments have the potential to transform how people

and businesses manage money. By combining the UK’s strengths as a global financial centre, fintech powerhouse and leader in AI, we have the opportunity to define the global standard for Agentic Commerce. Autonomous agents remove administrative friction, while navigating complex financial decisions, making everyday commerce faster and more personalised. None of this can happen without trust.

Agentic payments: the next frontier of intelligent financial infrastructure There was a shift in the conversation around AI at Money20/20 Europe this year. We’ve moved beyond asking what AI could do, towards the question: what are we prepared to let it do?

nstead of AI simply helping someone make a payment, an AI agent can decide when a payment should happen, work out the best way and take action on the user’s behalf. That could mean choosing between payment rails, managing risk, or even making a purchase unassisted. Three things are combining to make this possible Firstly, AI is getting much better at making decisions rather than simply generating predictions or recommendations. That opens the possibility of payment systems that respond dynamically rather than following fixed rules.

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Secondly, infrastructure is catching up. Tokenised money, real-time payments and increasingly interoperable payment rails are creating the foundations for money to move in faster, more flexible ways. We saw a good example this year with Europe’s first productionready agentic payments flow. What stood out wasn’t the technology, but different parts of the payment chain working together to make autonomous payments possible. Banks, fintechs and platforms are building more modular tech stacks Thirdly, financial services are being restructured. Data, risk, fraud and compliance are becoming

As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of consumers, people must have complete confidence that those agents are secure and acting within the limits of their authority. Trust will be the deciding factor in adoption. Modernisation is the key The UK has a strong regulatory foundation. The priority now is to modernise it for the age of agentic payments. That means establishing clear legal definitions for AI agents, expanding the UK Digital Verification Services Trust Framework so agents can securely verify identity and transaction attributes, in tandem with updating consumer protection and APP fraud reimbursement rules, so liability is clear when an agent is compromised or acts beyond its mandate. These reforms would give regulators the tools to protect consumers while giving businesses the certainty to innovate and invest. Britain has led previous waves of fintech innovation by pairing entrepreneurial ambition with progressive regulation. Agentic payments demand this approach. If we act with pace and purpose, the UK will not just keep up with the future of AI-driven finance – it will shape it.

increasingly connected. Agents could ultimately become the tissue that brings these pieces together. The opportunity isn’t just to automate existing processes. An AI agent could choose the most efficient payment route based on cost, speed and availability. It could spot unusual behaviour before a transaction is complete, or select the best option for a customer without requiring them to navigate a series of choices. In this future, payments become almost invisible. But there is a catch: the more autonomy we give these systems, the more trust matters.

WRITTEN BY Oliver Smith Head of Content, Money20/20 Europe

AI making a recommendation is one thing; AI moving money is another That makes questions around identity, fraud, security and regulation far more important. The challenge isn’t teaching an agent how to make a payment; it’s deciding what it is allowed to do, who is accountable when something goes wrong and how we make the system trustworthy. That is the most fascinating part of this conversation. Agentic payments could change not just how money moves, but how financial services themselves are designed. At Money20/20 Europe, it felt like we were starting to move from talking about that future to building it.

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