Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents need trusted verification mechanisms to interact with payment systems in agentic commerce scenarios. FACT (Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust) by Fime strives to provide that.
Fime, a global consulting and testing firm focused on payments, fintech, and digital transaction technologies, and well-known for its consulting division Consult Hyperion, is introducing the new agentic commerce solution called FACT.
Short for Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust, FACT enables financial institutions, merchants and other stakeholders within the wider payment ecosystem to securely manage transactions initiated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents rather than humans.
This trust layer is a neutral infrastructure, allowing for continuous, real-time verification of AI-driven transactions across various platforms, payment rails, and financial ecosystems. Its main features include:
- Intent validation to ensure alignment with user or enterprise objectives.
- Real-time policy and compliance monitoring.
- Independent auditor agents providing neutral trust verification.
- Transaction-level trust attestation for enhanced decisioning and auditability.
One of the main promises of the new trust-as-a-service solution is that it can function as a shared trust framework between merchants, banks and fintechs, and even regulators. This interoperability could help better assess the transaction intent and authenticity than transcribing various machine signals in an ecosystem fragmented by siloed, platform-controlled models.
“Agentic commerce is not a future concept. It is already emerging across payment and digital ecosystems. But while we have built systems that allow AI to transact, we have not yet built systems that allow us to trust those transactions at scale,” said Lionel Grosclaude, CEO at Fime. “FACT introduces the missing layer: a neutral, continuously verifiable trust infrastructure that enables autonomous commerce to grow safely, transparently and globally. This is critical to mass adoption of agentic commerce so we are actively engaging with the ecosystem already and will share updates on pilots soon.”
At present, numerous tech companies are trying to solve the exact same problem – making money delegation to AI agents safe and controllable. Mastercard has earlier unveiled Verifiable Intent trust layer — a tamper-resistant record of what a consumer authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf. The system creates cryptographic proof of authorization that consumers, merchants, and issuers can rely on, regardless of which AI platform or protocol is involved.
Google has rolled out not one, but two agentic commerce-focused protocols: Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for different aspects of AI agent interaction against commercial platforms.
Not only global payments and tech giants are concerned about enabling agentic commerce. Smaller startups like AI agent infrastructure-focused Nevermined are entering the space with AI agent payments infrastructure and card delegation products.
