The news: PayPal and FIS debuted new partnerships and tools to advance agentic commerce, per press releases.

• PayPal will support Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard which supports secure interoperability between AI-powered shopping platforms, per a press release.
• FIS announced partnerships with Visa and Mastercard to advance their banking clients’ ability to mediate agentic commerce within their platforms.

What this means:  UCP will assist with product and service discovery, pricing and availability queries, user intent and authorization checks, transaction confirmation, and fulfillment. Consumers will be able to check out with PayPal without having to leave Gemini’s chat interface. PayPal’s buy button exists with no competitors besides Google’s Google Pay.

Banks partnered with FIS will be able to facilitate secure AI-agent led sales by authenticating “good” bots versus “bad” bots for safe shopping.  

How we got here: A flurry of new protocols have hit the market as payment providers work to snag early AI platform-backed payment volume, with the bet that consumer’s shopping journeys will shift with access to AI tools—potentially redesign payment rails’ pathways and dominance.

• Visa released Trusted Agent Protocol, which facilitates communication between merchants and AI agents to complete transactions.
• Mastercard launched Agent Pay, which serves the same function.
• Klarna rolled out its own protocol, Agent Product Protocol, serving mostly back-end purposes around discoverability.
• Affirm opted for a partnership with Google’s AP2 to get its installment loans more visibility in front of bots and agentic shoppers.
• Splitit, a smaller buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider, used its Agentic Commerce Partnership Program to get early mover advantage in the installment space.
• Stripe debuted its Agentic Commerce Suite to enable agentic commerce for its merchants.
• And OpenAI partnered with Stripe to develop their own Agentic Commerce Protocol.

Implications for merchants: Merchants wanting to capture AI-agent led payment volume need to partner with payment providers with robust protocols. 

With both discoverability and payments increasingly becoming linked to AI agents—through payment providers—merchants need comprehensive coverage from payment platforms to succeed in agentic-led marketplaces.