As we are entering an era of autonomous, negotiated commerce, agents will not be loyal to one rail, they will be loyal to outcomes, argues Philip Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at ACI Worldwide
Step into a bustling old‑world medina, and the air hums with possibility. Traders call out from shaded stalls, scents and colours collide, and every purchase is a small performance, buyers hint at what they want, sellers counter with offers, and the price dances until both sides nod in agreement.
We are beginning to build a smart digital parallel to that world as AI agents learn to discover, compare, negotiate, and complete purchases on our behalf. What is new isn’t just smarter search, it’s that these agents can now verify identity, carry tokenized payment credentials, and transact with our consent on familiar, trusted payment rails. With Mastercard’s Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce now in market, agent‑to‑agent transactions are moving from concept to practical reality.
From checkout to micro‑RFP
In an agentic marketplace, every purchase becomes a micro‑RFP. Buyer agents broadcast requirements: Budget, delivery, returns, warranty, and solicit machine‑readable offers from merchants, or the agents of merchants. They then negotiate the best payment method as part of the deal: Tokenized card for acceptance and protections, account‑to‑account (A2A) for cost and speed, or instant payment for real‑time reconciliation. This is more than a new checkout button; it is a restructuring of commerce around competitive selection and programmable payments. A recent McKinsey & Company report describes agentic commerce as a structural shift that moves agents from recommendation to autonomous execution across shopping, negotiation and payment.
To put this into context: Imagine a UK household planning its weekly grocery shop. Today, they might split purchases between Tesco, Aldi or Ocado, comparing prices, availability, and delivery slots. In a Digital Medina world, their AI agent would compile a full shopping list, including preferences for brands, dietary needs, budget, delivery timing, and broadcast it across multiple retailers. Supermarkets would respond with dynamically assembled baskets, optimising price, substitutions, promotions, delivery windows, and loyalty benefits. The agent would then evaluate and negotiate across these offers and select the best overall combination – turning a routine grocery shop into a real-time, optimised marketplace negotiation.
The trust fabric: identity, tokens, and consent
If the digital medina is to scale, trust must be native. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard’s Agent Pay register and verify AI agents, bind them to tokenized credentials, and enforce delegated permissions and spend limits so a transaction is recognizable and auditable end‑to‑end. That is crucial for dispute clarity and fraud controls when the buyer at the virtual stall is not a human, but an agent acting with your consent.
This builds on a decade of progress in network tokenization, which is already delivering lower fraud and higher authorization rates. Visa reports that about half of global e‑commerce transactions are now tokenized with measurable approval‑rate uplift and fraud reduction; industry analyses confirm tokenization’s momentum and its central role in enabling agentic payments. Tokens become the agent’s passport in the medina.
Multi‑rail payments become a strategy variable
Agents will not be loyal to one rail; they will be loyal to outcomes. Across Europe, instant payments are now mandatory for all euro‑area PSPs following rollout of the Instant Payments Regulation, putting real‑time transfers on equal footing with traditional credit transfers and making them fully agent‑friendly. In the UK, almost 30 million Open Banking payments are being made every month, , giving agents a strong low‑cost alternative for larger‑value transactions.
Globally, instant A2A rails are scaling even faster. Brazil’s Pix processed about 80 billion transactions in 2025 and India’s UPI, with over 500 million active users, remains the dominant digital rail for everyday payments.
The data layer catches up
Agents thrive on structured, rich data. With ISO 20022 now standard across major networks for cross‑border payments, the industry has shifted onto a common backbone of consistent party data, purpose codes and enhanced remittance information, improving screening, automation and reconciliation at scale. As this new standard becomes universal across payment networks, it aligns perfectly with agentic commerce’s need for machine‑legible, end‑to‑end payment context, giving agents the reliable data foundation required to execute transactions autonomously and securely.
Risk will be machine‑mediated
Fraud will not disappear; it will change shape. Providers need consortium‑grade signals, behavioral analytics and agent reputation to spot anomalies across channels and participants in real time. Fraud orchestration is fast becoming a competitive differentiator, combining network visibility, model management and flexible deployment, to keep false positives low while stopping agent‑enabled scams. Meanwhile, agent registration and governance create new gates for bad actors.
What this means for the ecosystem
Issuers must expose agent‑aware controls (dynamic spend limits, merchant category constraints, token lifecycle management) and be ready for agent‑tagged disputes. Acquirers and PSPs need to make offers machine‑legible: Clear delivery, returns and fees, and surface agent‑readable APIs using emerging patterns so agents can discover capabilities without custom work. Merchants should prepare for payment method optimization at the edge, where an agent balances cost, protection and conversion on each transaction.
Who will succeed in the new digital medina
In the emerging Digital Medina, the most successful players won’t be those who simply move money, they’ll be the ones who can orchestrate it. The winners will operate more like market stewards than single stalls, coordinating the flow of commerce across every rail and every agent.
They will also provide next‑generation trust services, ensuring that agent‑initiated transactions remain safe, traceable and governed. Just as importantly, they’ll make the system agent‑legible: harmonizing tokenization, consent frameworks, dispute signals and ISO 20022 data so agents can reliably discover, understand and invoke payment capabilities without bespoke integrations.
Finally, the most effective operators will offer modern, cloud‑native infrastructure that lets banks, merchants and platforms retire legacy complexity and expose new, agent‑ready services at scale. In a marketplace where AI agents compare not just prices but payment efficiencies, resilience and trust, the leaders will be those who can make the entire ecosystem work seamlessly, the architects of the bazaar, not just its merchants.
Don’t get lost in the new medina
In the agentic medina, payments is not a toll gate, it is the engine room of competition. And here is the uncomfortable truth: within a few years, most transactions will be negotiated, routed and executed by agents long before a human even sees the confirmation screen. The winners will be those who make every offer legible to agents, every identity trustworthy, and every rail seamlessly orchestrated.
