Visa, Mastercard, Amex, UnionPay build agentic payments identity layers

Major card schemes including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and UnionPay are developing identity, authorisation, and tokenisation layers to capture agentic payments as commerce shifts to AI interfaces. At the same time, cross-network alternatives such as Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Agent Payments Protocol have emerged to handle AI-driven transactions. These frameworks introduce various approaches to consumer intent, cryptographically signed credentials, and liability allocation as agentic payments move from testing into real transactions. Open article →