Credit card network behemoth Visa, and its chief rival, Mastercard, are joining forces with Stripe and Google to set standards for evolving agentic shopping and payments, even as they compete in the arena.
Stripe said Tuesday that it’s beginning to deploy its “shared payments token” technology that will act as a facilitator for agentic commerce, tapping the card networks for payments, and doing the same with buy now, pay later players Klarna Group and Affirm Holdings.
“For sellers, the experience is straightforward,” Stripe said Tuesday in a blog post. “You interact only with SPTs, while Stripe handles the complexity of provisioning agentic network and BNPL tokens behind the scenes.”
Visa, Mastercard, American Express and other payments service providers are all trying to position their companies as ready for AI-driven agents safely and securely transmitting consumer and commercial payments over their networks.
Such agentic payments may drive between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030, according to the consulting firm McKinsey.
Companies across the payments spectrum are competing, to some degree, to control the standards under which such transactions will take place, but also locking arms to set standards that will make agentic commerce more straightforward for merchants and other participants.
At investment bank Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media and Telecom conference Tuesday, the analyst host asked Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, about the need for shared standards in the agentic ecosystem.
Forestell acknowledged that the overall agentic picture, in terms of standards, is a bit muddy at the moment. He described how there are layers of standards needed at the broader Web level as well as for shopping and separately for payments.
“We need standards – we're at an early stage of it,” Forestell said. “There are a lot of them out there, but we are maniacally focused on delivering and ensuring that those payment standards get adopted.”
He pointed to Visa’s “hard work” on specifications with Stripe. “We've been working on that one for quite some time, but we're very excited to see it starting to take shape,” he said.
Tech titan Google has been out front in the agentic commerce standard-setting race, outlining its Universal Commerce Protocol standard for merchants in January, with Visa, Mastercard and other companies joining in. That followed Google laying out an agent payments protocol last September that included collaborating with Mastercard, which dubbed its approach “agent pay.”
Then, Visa came out last October with its own “trusted agent protocol” aimed at enabling secure transactions between AI agents and merchants. That protocol, which allows for identification of bots and the transfer of payments credentials for a purchase, is part of Visa’s broader agentic “intelligent commerce” approach.
“At the same time as the user, though, is expanding these horizons, and in the process creating more complex, riskier transactions, the expectation for simplicity, seamlessness, security and trust are at an all time high,” Forestell said.
On Thursday, Mastercard introduced another aspect of its agentic work with Google, offering an open standard “to make user authorization explicit, provable, and privacy‑preserving in agent‑led commerce,” according to an emailed statement.
The new standard was co‑developed with Google, with buy-in from other processors including Worldpay, Fiserv, Checkout.com and Adyen. It’s aimed at providing “cryptographic proof of what a consumer actually authorized, helping merchants, issuers, and consumers transact with confidence as commerce becomes more autonomous.”
“We're helping secure these transactions, and we're helping with this tokenization technology, and new technology that we are deploying for agentic,” Mastercard’s Chief Digital Officer, Pablo Fourez, said in a December interview.
“A big piece of what we are doing is setting up standards for the industry so that this is something that every merchant can take advantage of, not just, let's say, the largest of merchants,” Fourez said.
FreedomPay President Christopher Kronenthal last month called the lack of standards in the agentic ecosystem a difficulty for all involved. FreedomPay, which provides merchants with payments systems and tools, has a stake in agentic commerce too.
“Inertia is going to happen, and fighting it only delays the inevitable, and no one wants to be the laggard,” Kronenthal said during an interview about the agentic standard jousting. “Everyone wins who's ahead of the curve or near the head of the curve. So the longer this fracturing exists, the worse off it is for everyone.”
Years ago battles over protocols for digital wallets slowed the development of those consumer tools, making for slow adoption rates, Kronenthal explained.
Managing multiple standards is always complicated, Kronenthal said. “They're smart to reconcile quickly, because otherwise it's just going to hurt and continue to delay progress.”
Stripe also plans to extend its shared payment token agentic payment capabilities to more methods of payment in the future, according to the blog post this week.
