Agentic payments explained: AP2 mandates, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay

This is a deep dive from my agentic commerce architecture blueprint. For which checkout protocol carries the payment, see ACP vs UCP.

Card payments rest on an assumption: the cardholder is present, or has clearly set up a recurring payment with this merchant. An agent breaks both. It might buy from a merchant the customer has never visited, at a time the customer is asleep, for a total the customer never saw.

That raises four questions that existing payment flows do not answer well:

UK law adds a fifth. Strong customer authentication (two of: something the customer knows, has or is) applies to most online card payments and assumes the customer is there to authenticate. Every serious agent payment design is, in part, an answer to how SCA is satisfied when the customer is not.

The simplest model for a merchant is a token issued by the agent’s payment provider. With the Agentic Commerce Protocol, Stripe’s Shared Payment Token lets an agent platform pass the merchant a credential that is limited to that merchant, an amount and a time window. The merchant charges it much like any other payment and never sees the card.

Stripe has since widened the model. At its Sessions conference in April 2026 it announced an agent wallet in Link, where customers grant agents permission to pay with spending approvals; single-use virtual cards that businesses can issue to their own agents; and the Machine Payments Protocol, co-authored with Tempo, for agent micro-transactions and recurring payments, accepted through the same token. Other payment providers are building equivalents, and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect is designed to accept payments started through several of these routes with one integration.

What it means for merchants: the lowest-effort path, provided your payment provider supports it. The trade-off is that the evidence of what the customer authorised sits largely with the platform, not with you.

Visa announced Intelligent Commerce on 30 April 2025 with AI platform partners including Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Samsung and Stripe. It packages five capabilities as APIs:

Two further pieces matter to merchants. The Trusted Agent Protocol (October 2025), with an agent directory, lets a merchant verify that a request comes from a recognised agent; it is covered in detail in Web Bot Auth and the Trusted Agent Protocol. Intelligent Commerce Connect (8 April 2026) is a single integration through Visa’s acceptance platform that supports the Trusted Agent Protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol, ACP and UCP, and handles non-Visa cards where available.

In July 2026 Visa reported live agent-executed purchases across Europe under its Agentic Ready programme, with more than 30 issuers involved. Those named include Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest and Revolut, alongside merchants including Frasers and lastminute.com.

Mastercard announced Agent Pay in April 2025. It rests on the same building blocks: agentic tokens tied to a specific agent, passkey authentication, and consent that the customer gives in advance. Mastercard describes the goal as making sure any action an agent takes “can be traced back to explicit consumer authorisation”, an idea it calls verifiable intent.

In 2026 Mastercard said all its issuers in Europe were enabled for Agent Pay at network level, and that 36 European banks had completed controlled live agentic transactions using passkeys. With Worldline and ING it completed a live transaction in which every part of the flow ran in Europe. Mastercard also worked with Cloudflare on the signed-agent standard behind agent recognition.

What the two networks mean for merchants: agentic card payments arrive as tokenised card transactions, flagged as agent-initiated, with controls applied by the network and issuer. Your payment provider has to support them; your fraud rules and dispute processes have to recognise them.

Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol on 16 September 2025 with more than 60 organisations, including Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Adyen, Worldpay, Coinbase and Revolut. It is payment-method agnostic: it works with cards, real-time bank transfers and, through the x402 extension built with Coinbase and others, stablecoins.

AP2 does not move money. It produces signed, tamper-evident records called mandates, built on verifiable credentials, that prove who authorised what.

Most merchants will not integrate with Visa, Mastercard or AP2 directly. They will receive agent payments through their payment service provider and through whichever checkout protocol the agent uses. The changes are real but mostly operational.

UK lawyers point to three workable patterns under current rules: authenticate the customer once when they provision a card to the agent, so the resulting token carries that authentication; rely on exemptions such as trusted beneficiaries, where the customer has whitelisted a merchant with their bank; and step up to the customer for higher-risk purchases. Passkeys make the first and third far less disruptive than one-time passcodes. What is not yet clear is how liability is shared when an agent misreads an instruction, which is why the evidence in the table above is not optional.

Payments are only one layer. Getting recommended comes first; that is covered in generative engine optimisation for ecommerce. The full architecture is in the main agentic commerce guide.