It has been less than a year since Visa and Mastercard unveiled platforms designed to give AI agents a larger role in retail—and actual purchasing power. In the months since, there has been a rush to build agentic commerce protocols, plan merchant integrations, and map out the fraud risks and potential liabilities.
Amid this push to prepare for the next big thing, many financial institutions are struggling to balance modernization efforts with compliance obligations and customer protections. As Matthew Gaughan, Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, detailed in the Agentic Commerce Approaches: How Can Banks Prepare? report, there are concrete steps organizations can take to lay the groundwork for agentic integrations and chart a path forward.
Leveraging the Shared Language
While the payment settlement process itself will likely remain unchanged in agentic commerce model, new front-end infrastructure capable of interacting with AI agents will be required. Some initiatives are already moving in this direction, including Google’s recent rollout of its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) platform.
AP2 is a neutral, open-source framework that enables merchants, consumers, and third-party companies to interact with agentic AI. The platform also includes built-in safeguards, known as mandates, which are designed to verify that an agent has accurately followed a user’s instructions.
While Google’s protocol has attracted a strong group of backers, several other organizations have launched competing solutions. Although none of these platforms has reached widescale adoption yet, financial institutions should begin evaluating which approaches best align with their strategic and operational needs.
“Those protocols essentially are establishing a shared language that allow payments to occur as they normally do,” Gaughan said. “The common thread through a lot of these developments is that the payment itself is handled normally on the merchant’s back end. It’s the protocol more so just makes it possible for this payment flow to occur.”
“The main takeaway is that agentic commerce goes hand-in-hand with modernization efforts in general,” he said. “Banks are going to need to be aware of these different protocols that are coming into play and that probably will require them to overhaul some of their internal systems to be more interoperable and accessible through APIs.”
Drawing Lines in the Sand
The growing number of nascent agentic commerce platforms can muddy the waters for financial leaders attempting to map out a clear strategy. Compounding this complexity are broader, unresolved questions about how agentic commerce will ultimately work.
For example, if a customer authorizes an AI agent to make a purchase and something goes awry, who’s ultimately responsible? This question becomes even more complex in scenarios involving first-party fraud, deliberate customer manipulation, or cases in which an AI agent is deceived into transacting with a fraudulent merchant.
“I’m sure banks are keenly watching this, just because in a lot of ways they’ll probably be the one—at least from a regulatory standpoint—that is ultimately on the hook,” Gaughan said. “In documentation available to developers, OpenAI made it clear that it thinks merchants own the payments associated with the transaction and that any settlement, refunds, chargebacks and compliance remain with the merchant and their payment service provider.”
“They’re all trying to draw lines in the sand, but I don’t think any of them truly know where it’s going to end,” he said. “You’re going from a standard where you might not have a card present at a transaction, but there still was always human involvement in the process.”
As generative AI adoption has expanded, the need for human oversight has become increasingly apparent. While models continue to improve, they still produce outcomes that are difficult to explain or plainly incorrect.
These uncertainties have contributed to a healthy degree of skepticism about whether agentic commerce will achieve widescale adoption.
“It’s an area that’s ripe for mistakes,” Gaughan said. “Also, there are bad actors out there optimizing fraudulent websites to look real and that are perfectly positioned and made for AI agents to interact with. Ultimately, the customer loses out on their money and they don’t get what they were buying.”
“It’s going to be an issue,” he said. “It’s going to continue to develop as the technology gets more popular—if it gets more popular. But it’s an area where the players involved are keenly aware of what’s at stake.”
A Nebulous Topic
The potential upside of the technology means organizations can’t afford to ignore it altogether. Instead, financial institutions should begin educating themselves on the emerging protocols within the broader agentic ecosystem and determine how these technologies may impact different areas of the bank.
Each protocol comes with its own nuances, and banks will likely need to support multiple platforms to meet diverse customer needs. While much of the current discussion focuses on consumer use cases, many banks also serve merchant clients with distinctly different requirements.
In parallel with infrastructure planning, banks will eventually need to address fraud risk and compliance considerations—though there is no immediate need to dive deeply into those issues.
“It’s a very big and still kind of nebulous area, but there are some important big-picture considerations that they should be mindful of when approaching this new framework,” Gaughan said. “It’s going to be a topic of conversation for any bank or board of directors, because everybody hears it nonstop every single day.”
Getting Ahead of the Game
Agentic commerce may still be in its early stages, but its potential to reshape payments makes it more than a passing buzzword. Given the industry’s mixed track record in responding to transformative technologies, it’s imperative for FIs to begin developing strategies now.
“Banks are still going strong, but many executives would admit that if you go back 10 years ago, they were a little behind on modernizing their technology,” Gaughan said. “It’s important that they be aware of what’s going on and how they can get ahead of things and set themselves up for a potential future where agentic commerce becomes more of the norm.”
“It’s not a given that that will be the case, but it’s important that they’re doing what they can to not only facilitate these transactions, but also to preserve any of their products—be it card products or accounts—anything to stay top of wallet for consumers,” he said.
