EMVCo, the global technical body behind the standards used to make billions of card-payments safe and consistent, announced that it is actively working on ways its specifications can better support the rise of so-called agentic payments, where AI agents act on a shopper’s behalf.
At its core, EMVCo creates and maintains what are known as EMV Specifications — technical rules and guidelines that ensure when you tap a card, pay online, or use a mobile wallet, the transaction works seamlessly and securely, no matter where you are. Among these, there are three key frameworks:
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EMV 3-D Secure (3DS): the system that helps to verify the identity of someone paying online so that card-not-present fraud is reduced.
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EMV Payment Tokenisation: the method by which a real card number is replaced by a safe “token” so that the card details don’t travel and can’t easily be stolen.
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EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC): the “click-to-pay” style standard that makes the online checkout simpler, consistent and secure across merchants and devices.
Why is all this suddenly more important? Because we are moving from human-initiated payments (you click “buy”, you enter card details) to a future where an AI assistant might do the buying for you. AI tools efficiently compare items, decide when to buy, and initiate payment automatically. Agentic commerce drastically changes who is doing the transaction. A machine is now often acting on behalf of a person, which means new hurdles for authentication, intent, security, and trust. EMVCo calls out that “agentic payments … introduce AI agents as new actors that can initiate transactions with merchants — without requiring direct involvement from the consumer.”
Still, it’s not just the specifications that need attention. Underneath all payment flows lie payment protocols — the messaging, communications and data standards that banks, processors and networks use behind the scenes. As pointed out in our earlier article, much of this infrastructure still runs on very old standards like ISO 8583, designed decades ago, and is increasingly strained by modern demands: real-time settlement, rich metadata, tokenised payments, agent-driven flows.
In other words, the payment and e-commerce industries need updated specifications (which EMVCo is working on), along with updated protocols that can support those specifications and the new type of payments they will enable.
Together, these developments signal that payments are entering a new chapter — one where machines may act for people, and where the rules and rails of payments must evolve accordingly.
