How — and Why — Your Bank Should Be Prepping for Agentic Payments Now

By Philip Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at ACI Worldwide

Published on July 6th, 2026 in Payments

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In the bustling old-world medina, the air hums with possibility. Traders call out from shaded stalls, scents and colors collide, and every purchase is a small performance. Buyers hint at what they want, sellers counter with offers, and the price dances until both sides nod in agreement.

Key point: We are beginning to build a digital version of that marketplace as AI agents learn to discover, compare, negotiate and complete purchases on our behalf. These agents can now verify identity, carry tokenized payment credentials, and transact on payment rails with our consent.

With Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce now in market, agent‑to‑agent transactions have evolved from concept to reality. Robinhood’s agentic trader shows these tools are already reaching consumers, not just infrastructure providers.

And the transactions themselves look far different. The nods of agreement in this digital bazaar are complex processes happening almost at the speed of sound.

Need to Know:

AI agents are learning to discover, negotiate and complete purchases autonomously. This turns every transaction into a competitive bidding process across merchants and payment rails.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce provide agent registration and tokenized credentials, but the industry has not yet resolved liability and dispute frameworks for agent-initiated transactions.
Instant payment rails are scaling globally, giving agents low-cost alternatives to card networks.

Banks and credit unions that prepare now for agent-grade digital identity, vertical marketplace partnerships, and small business-friendly agent tools will capture transaction flow as agentic commerce scales.

The Age of the Micro‑RFP Model

In an agentic marketplace, every purchase becomes a micro request for proposal. Buyer agents broadcast requirements and solicit machine‑readable offers from merchants or merchants’ agents. They then negotiate the best payment method as part of the deal: tokenized card for acceptance and protections, account‑to‑account (A2A) for cost and speed, or instant payment for real‑time reconciliation, for example.

Case-in-point: For instance, imagine a household planning its weekly grocery trip. Instead of splitting purchases across Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Publix and Walmart, this family has an AI agent that compiles a full shopping list, including preferences for brands, dietary needs, budget, delivery timing. It broadcasts it across multiple retailers. Supermarkets respond with dynamically assembled baskets, optimizing price, substitutions, promotions, delivery windows and loyalty benefits. The agent evaluates these offers, negotiates and selects the best combination.

Key insight: In this new model, payment method selection stops being a consumer’s afterthought at checkout and is instead a variable the agent optimizes alongside price and delivery.

For banks, that means the rails you offer compete in every transaction, whether you know it or not.

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The Trust That’s Essential to Agentic Payments

For agentic commerce to scale, trust must be native. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard’s Agent Pay register and verify AI agents, bind them to tokenized credentials, and enforce delegated permissions and spend limits so a transaction can be traced and audited. That is crucial when the buyer at the other end is not a human, but an agent acting with a consumer’s consent.

Visa reports that about half of global e‑commerce transactions are now tokenized. That existing infrastructure gives agents a credentialing layer that already works.

But credentialing is only half the equation.

What’s harder to solve is liability. Current chargeback and dispute frameworks were designed around a human buyer who clicked “purchase” and can attest to intent.

When an agent executes a transaction autonomously and produces an outcome the consumer didn’t expect, who owns the dispute?

The card networks’ agent frameworks establish registration and spend controls, but the industry has not yet resolved how existing consumer protection rules like Regulation E and the Payment Services Directive apply when the “buyer” is AI. Issuers, acquirers and regulators will need to close that gap before agent-initiated transactions can reach mainstream volume.

Multi‑Rail Payments Become a Strategic Variable

Agents will not be loyal to one rail; they will be loyal to outcomes.

Across Europe, instant payments are now mandatory for all euro‑area payment service providers (PSPs) following rollout of the Instant Payments Regulation, putting real‑time transfers on equal footing with traditional credit transfers. In the U.K., 17 million people already choose Open Banking, which gives agents a low‑cost alternative for larger‑value transactions.

Globally, instant account-to-account rails (A2A) are scaling faster. Brazil’s Pix processed about 80 billion transactions in 2025 and India’s Unified Payments Interface, with over 500 million active users, remains the dominant digital rail for everyday payments.

Meanwhile, the data layer is catching up. With ISO 20022 now standard across major networks for cross-border payments, agents have a common backbone of consistent party data, purpose codes, and enhanced remittance information — the machine-legible context they need to execute transactions autonomously.

Agentic Payments Risk Will Be Machine‑Mediated

Fraud will take a new shape. An agent carrying compromised tokenized credentials could execute hundreds of low-value transactions across merchants in minutes.

Reality check: That’s well below individual fraud-detection thresholds but devastating in aggregate. Through prompt injection, agents could be manipulated into overriding spend parameters or misrepresenting buyer intent to merchant systems.

Defending against these risks requires a different kind of fraud infrastructure:

• Providers need consortium‑grade signals, behavioral analytics, and agent reputation to spot anomalies in real time.

• Fraud orchestration is becoming a competitive differentiator, combining network visibility, model management, and flexible deployment to keep false positives low while stopping agent‑enabled scams.

• The same registration and governance frameworks that enable trust also create new checkpoints for bad actors — but only if fraud systems are built to process agent-tagged transactions.

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What Banks and Credit Unions Should Be Doing Now

Agentic commerce won’t arrive all at once, but institutions that wait for full market maturity to respond will find themselves playing catch-up against competitors and fintechs that moved earlier.

Four priorities deserve attention:

1. Get ready for agent-grade digital identity.

When an AI agent initiates a transaction on behalf of a consumer or business customer, the institution on the other end needs to verify both the agent and the whoever or whatever it represents. That means tying agent credentials to verified business identities, enforcing permission scopes, and maintaining audit trails.

The card networks’ agent registration frameworks are a starting point. But banks and credit unions will need their own controls layered on top, particularly around spend limits and dispute handling for agent-tagged transactions.

2. Explore building or deploying procurement agents for business clients.

For commercial clients, AI agents could source vendors, set evaluation criteria, solicit bids, and execute purchases within parameters the client defines.

Banks and credit unions that offer these capabilities as part of their treasury or commercial banking suite gain stickiness with business clients who would otherwise turn to fintechs or platform providers for agent-powered procurement.

This is especially relevant for institutions with strong commercial lending portfolios looking to deepen those relationships beyond credit.

3. Identify vertical marketplaces where you already have market share.

Agentic commerce will gain traction fastest in industries with high transaction volumes, standardized products, and price-sensitive buyers — think healthcare supplies, food service distribution, building materials, and fleet management.

Banks and credit unions with concentrated lending or deposit relationships in these verticals should partner with or build marketplace integrations that give their clients’ agents preferred access to payment rails, credit facilities, and settlement infrastructure. The advantage is being deeply embedded in the verticals where your clients already operate.

4. Build a simpler on-ramp for small and mid-sized businesses.

Corporate clients have treasury teams and technology budgets to configure agents, set parameters, and manage exceptions. Small and mid-sized businesses do not. They’ll need more guided, out-of-the-box agent capabilities, like preconfigured procurement agents, simplified approval workflows, and default spend controls that don’t require dedicated IT support.

Community banks and credit unions, which already serve as trusted advisors to small firms, are the right partners to fill this gap.

Key insight: Small businesses represent the largest addressable market for agentic commerce tools, but only if the barrier to entry is low enough. The institution that makes agent-powered purchasing as easy to activate as mobile deposit capture will own that segment.

In a marketplace where AI agents compare not just prices but payment efficiency, resilience and trust, the advantage goes to the architects of the bazaar, not just its merchants.