Stripe just shipped an Agentic Commerce Suite. PayPal launched Agent Ready. Visa predicts millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season. Mastercard introduced Agent Pay with its own verification layer. Google launched the Agent Payments Protocol with 60+ partners.
Everyone is scrambling to make payments work for AI agents.
And I keep looking at all of it thinking: you're bolting agent support onto a stack that was designed for a human staring at a checkout page. That's not an integration. That's a retrofit.
I run payments infrastructure. Our platform processes open banking payments for UK merchants — the kind where money moves directly from the customer's bank account, no card network in between. And from where I sit, the agentic payments conversation has a blind spot the size of Visa's interchange fee.
Let me explain.
