Klarna, the global digital bank and flexible payments provider, has announced support for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a newly introduced open standard aimed at enabling agentic commerce across platforms.
The move builds on Klarna’s ongoing collaboration with Google, including its earlier adoption of Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and reflects a broader industry push to create interoperable standards that support AI-driven shopping and frictionless checkout experiences.
Klarna’s AI Payments Evolution
Klarna has been positioning itself at the intersection of AI, payments, and commerce infrastructure. In late 2025, the company unveiled its Agentic Product Protocol, an open standard designed to make product catalogs discoverable by AI agents — a foundational layer for next-generation commerce experiences where AI systems can identify and recommend products on behalf of users.
Upon its launch, the firm also immediately supported Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard focused on enabling secure, agent-initiated transactions across digital environments, helping ensure that autonomous AI agents have proper authorization and verifiable consent when executing payments on behalf of users.
These initiatives signal Klarna’s commitment to both product discovery and secure transaction execution in AI-powered commerce, positioning its payments infrastructure as one of the key enablers in emerging agentic ecosystems.
What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Is
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), developed by Google in collaboration with major retail and commerce partners, is an open-source standard designed to support seamless end-to-end shopping experiences powered by AI agents.
Unlike traditional e-commerce integrations where every platform or AI assistant would need bespoke connections to each merchant and payment provider, UCP aims to provide a common language and flexible architecture that connects the entire commerce lifecycle, from product discovery and cart building to checkout and post-purchase support.
Key characteristics of UCP include:
- Unified integration for merchants, agents, payment providers, and platforms, reducing the need for bespoke connections.
- Compatibility across multiple industry protocols, including Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Agent2Agent (A2A), and Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing secure transitions from intent to transaction.
- Support for modular commerce features such as dynamic pricing, tax calculation, order management, and fulfillment, while letting merchants retain ownership as the Merchant of Record.
- Open-source implementation that can be adopted by any AI platform or retail system, aligning with Google’s vision of agentic commerce being platform-agnostic and interoperable.
UCP has already been implemented in early use cases on Google surfaces, including AI Mode in Google Search and the Gemini app, allowing eligible retailers to surface a “Buy” button and complete purchases directly within conversational interfaces using saved payment methods such as Google Pay.
How UCP Differs from Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
Since Google has recently rolled out not one but two protocols focused on agentic commerce, this may cause some confusion. While both UCP and AP2 are part of the emerging architecture for AI-driven commerce, they serve distinct but complementary roles.
UCP is a full commerce lifecycle protocol that covers the whole buying journey, from discovery and cart creation through checkout, order fulfillment, and post-purchase interactions, and facilitates how AI agents, merchants, platforms, and payment systems exchange information in a standardized way. It abstracts the entire shopping experience into a common framework.
Meanwhile, AP2 focuses specifically on secure payment authorization for agent-initiated transactions by establishing cryptographically verifiable evidence that a user has authorized a purchase. Designed to support secure and trusted agentic payments, AP2 creates proofs of user consent that can be integrated with payment methods and cryptographic mandates.
In other words, AP2 is centered on the trust and authorization aspects of payments initiated by AI agents, while UCP provides a broader commerce-oriented standard for how discovery, checkout, and order flow should proceed across diverse platforms. UCP can work in concert with AP2 and other protocols like A2A and MCP to form a complete agentic commerce stack.
Industry Collaboration and Ecosystem Impact
Google’s UCP has drawn support from a host of major players across the commerce and payments ecosystem, including Shopify, Target, Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, and more. This broad industry backing aims to encourage interoperability, lowering technical barriers for merchants and payment providers adopting agentic commerce standards.
Klarna’s support for UCP and earlier work with AP2 reflect not only a deepening relationship with Google but also a broader trend in which payments companies that embrace innovation are aligning with emerging open standards that allow AI assistants to more seamlessly interact with retail systems and settlement infrastructure.
As AI usage continues to grow, and consumers are increasingly asking agents to handle tasks from product comparison to booking travel, these open protocols may play a critical role in shaping how and where agentic commerce scales across platforms while balancing security, user control, and merchant interests.
