Worldline has become one of the first payment providers in Europe to launch a payment handler for the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Worldline’s move, announced today, lets merchants accept AI-initiated purchases across multiple platforms through a single setup.
Agentic commerce are shopping transactions in which AI agents search, select, and pay for products on a consumer’s behalf, within limits the consumer sets in advance. McKinsey estimates that transactions routed through AI agents could reach $3–5 trillion by 2030. So, merchants that adapt their payment infrastructure early stand to gain a competitive edge.
Stijn Gasthuys, Head of Global Commerce & CEO of Global Collect at Worldline Group, said: “As AI starts to play a bigger role in how consumers discover and buy products, merchants are looking for ways to capture these new opportunities without adding complexity to their operations. Our role is to make that possible through payment capabilities they already know and trust.”
UCP is an open standard for agentic commerce co-developed by Google and industry partners. It works as the common language for platforms, agents, and businesses doing agentic commerce sales. UCP provides building blocks for agentic commerce that let discovery, checkout, and post-purchase processes run on one standard. The standard doesn’t require custom builds for each connection, which merchants and providers should find beneficial. The protocol was co-developed by Google alongside partners including Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, and Stripe, and is endorsed by a wider group of retailers, banks, and payment companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Adyen.
Within UCP, a payment handler is the component that connects an AI platform’s checkout flow to a specific payment provider’s infrastructure. Worldline’s Global Collect payment handler defines how a merchant using the Worldline Global Collect platform interoperates with UCP platforms. It supports card, redirect, and mobile wallet instrument types. The AI platform interacts only with the merchant’s UCP endpoints, while the merchant holds its Worldline credentials server-side. The tool translates UCP calls into Worldline Connect API calls, keeping card data off the platform’s servers.
The handler is available with Global Collect, Worldline’s cross-border payment platform, letting merchants declare their payment configuration once and accept it across any UCP-connected AI surface without rebuilding integrations anew as extra platforms emerge.
Gertjan Dewaele, VP Product & Technology at Worldline Global Commerce, noted: “With the Worldline Global Collect Payment Handler, we have built a universal adaptor on UCP that securely bridges agentic commerce platforms and merchant backends, enabling merchants to prepare for agentic commerce and scale across multiple platforms tomorrow.”
The launch continues the history of earlier agentic payment pilots by Worldline. In June, Worldline and ING completed what they described as Europe’s first live, end-to-end agentic payment transaction in a production environment. They used Mastercard’s network between an ING cardholder and a merchant in the Netherlands.
The following month, Worldline, ING, and Visa completed a similar live transaction in Germany using Visa Payment Passkeys and biometric authentication. Furthermore, Worldline and ING joined Visa’s Agentic Ready Programme at the moment. In both cases, the issuing bank retained authorization control while Worldline processed the transaction across its infrastructure.
