ACI Worldwide and The Paypers recently hosted an exclusive three-part virtual summit that gathered industry leaders, innovators, and policymakers to explore the rapidly evolving payments landscape. From the rise of agentic commerce to real-time cross-border infrastructure and collaborative fraud defence, this series dives into the technologies, strategies, and partnerships shaping the future of global payments.
“If people trust AI with their therapy, they’ll likely trust it with financial decisions.” That’s how David Birch kicked off day one of the summit, focusing on agentic commerce—a powerful, fast-evolving concept moving from theory to reality.
Day one of the summit, Agentic Commerce: The Final Frontier of Payments, featured Philip Bruno (ACI Worldwide), Jelena Hoffart (Mastercard), and Craig DeWitt (Skyfire), who explored how agentic AI is automating financial decisions, transforming value chain engagement, and redefining competition in an AI-first payments ecosystem.
In 2025, agentic commerce—where AI agents autonomously handle transactions and manage purchases for users—moved from concept to reality, driven by bold initiatives from major payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. These efforts marked a turning point, signalling the dawn of a new era in digital commerce.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay integrates with agentic AI to enable secure, tokenised payments by autonomous agents, partnering with Microsoft and IBM to scale both consumer and B2B use cases. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform envisions AI agents as central players in shopping, working with leading AI companies to build a trusted payment layer for agent-driven transactions. Meanwhile, PayPal’s Agentic Toolkit provides developers with tools to build agentic commerce capabilities, accelerating the growth of the ecosystem.
Together, these initiatives lay the foundational infrastructure and standards for agentic commerce, setting the stage for AI-driven shopping and payments to become mainstream—fundamentally transforming how consumers and businesses engage in digital transactions.
Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in financial technology. Unlike simple automation or rule-based systems, it involves ecosystems of AI agents working together: orchestrator agents coordinate, while task-specific agents perform specialised functions such as browsing, selecting, purchasing, and managing finances without human intervention.
This technology is designed to make financial transactions essentially disappear into the background.
Managing payments, rewards, and other routine financial tasks is often tedious and uninteresting for most people. Agentic commerce aims to relieve this burden by automating these processes, allowing consumers to achieve better financial outcomes with minimal effort. Rather than simply making payments easier to execute, this shift is about making financial management fade into the background—handled seamlessly by AI agents.
Beyond convenience, agentic commerce has important implications for financial literacy and consumer financial health. Many individuals struggle to make informed decisions about financial services, and AI agents can provide real-time, personalised guidance to help users navigate complex financial choices effortlessly. Having bots assist in these decisions is an obvious advantage.
At the heart of agentic commerce lies a major challenge: how do we know who – or what – we’re really dealing with? That’s why the industry is increasingly focused on creating a “Know Your Agent” (KYA) framework, similar to the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) checks used in banking. Without a reliable way to verify AI agents, it becomes difficult to assign responsibility when things go wrong – or to prevent fraud before it happens.
Trust starts with identity. Without a solid identity layer, agentic commerce is vulnerable to risks like fraudulent chargebacks. For instance, if an AI agent makes a purchase the user later disputes, who’s liable? Without strong identity verification, resolving these cases becomes messy and uncertain.
Among the use cases discussed in the webinar, the following stood out for their strong potential:
These examples show that agentic commerce goes far beyond simple automation—it's creating an ecosystem where AI agents can operate with a high degree of autonomy to deliver smarter, faster, and more personalised services.
A live poll revealed most organisations are still in the early stages or have yet to begin their agentic commerce journey. Many companies feel unprepared to fully implement these technologies but recognise the need to establish trust frameworks and operational parameters now.
Philip Bruno of ACI Worldwide explained that in ecommerce, many companies will have to adapt to agentic commerce because major players have already adopted it, drawing businesses from many sectors into this new space. He highlighted that agentic commerce is rapidly expanding beyond traditional financial services, drawing in companies from diverse sectors. He pointed out that major retailers like Walmart are actively participating by offering AI agents directly to consumers, complementing their own internal AI systems. This trend reflects a broader movement where organisations across industries recognise the value of integrating autonomous agents to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and stay competitive in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace. As a result, businesses are being pulled into the agentic commerce ecosystem, collaborating with payment networks and technology providers to develop seamless, agent-enabled commerce solutions.
As agentic commerce matures, it will transform several key aspects of business and consumer interaction:
Agentic commerce is not a distant vision – it’s rapidly becoming a reality. While significant hurdles around identity verification, trust, and fraud prevention remain, the consensus is clear: the way transactions are conducted will fundamentally change. The question for businesses is no longer if agentic commerce will become mainstream, but when – and how prepared they will be.
This presentation only highlights the key points of the discussion, to get the full scoop on agentic commerce, watch the webinar recording here.
About Oana Ifrim
She can be reached at oana@thepaypers.com or on LinkedIn.
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