By Shaun Puckrin, Chief Product Officer, GoCardless
Imagine asking an AI assistant to source and sort your car insurance renewal, or set up a monthly donation to a cause you care about, without spending an evening flicking between browser tabs and comparing options. You chat to an agent, and it’ll do everything for you, from research to payment – that’s agentic commerce.
Earlier this year, HM Treasury’s AI Adoption Plan named agentic payments one of five priority areas for AI in financial services. That raises real questions: how will agentic payments actually work, and do we have the infrastructure to support it?
Headway is already being made; the mechanisms of how it’ll work are being tested and defined now.
What are the options for agentic payments?
Two ways of paying today could be a fit for agentic commerce: cards, built around a payer presenting a credential at a single point of sale, and A2A payments, built around standing, revocable authority that holds over time. Crypto is often touted as a third option, but gas fees and wallet funding still need complex orchestration that breaks autonomous flow, and it lacks the dispute resolution, refunds and fraud protection that mass adoption relies on and traditional rails cover.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay gives verified AI agents a limited, tokenised version of a cardholder’s card, and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol lets an agent attach a signed digital ID that a merchant checks against a Visa-run directory before paying out. Cards are already accepted almost everywhere, tokenisation is proven technology (Apple Pay and Google Pay settled that years ago), and a card network can ship a new standard unilaterally in months.
But card networks were built for humans to swipe (or tap) based on a single authorisation, rather than for software to execute. Verifying that an agent is who it claims to be, and capping what it can spend, is real and important progress. Nevertheless, card companies have had to retrofit these processes for cards to work as a viable method for agentic payments. It leaves an underlying payment method doing a job it was never meant to do.
There’s a second cost to building agentic payments on cards, separate from the retrofitting: it reinforces the UK’s dependency on international card schemes at exactly the moment the country has a chance to rebalance its payments ecosystem. In 2024, 64% of all payments in the UK were on card networks. Every agentic transaction that defaults to card is another transaction routed through overseas rails, and another slice of the fee handed over with it. A2A keeps that authority and value with the payer’s own bank instead and increases the UK’s payment sovereignty.
Expired, lost, or stolen cards are common reasons payments fail. Meanwhile, A2A payments are based on bank accounts that never expire and are built on a foundation of payment automation that we’ve seen bring success rates of 97.3%* on the first try, whilst being at a competitive price point. In addition, A2A payments give payers the ability to set limits or cancel a mandate, a must-have for agentic payments.
Precisely because A2A payments were never built around a single card authorisation, they’re incredibly well-suited to the world of digital payments and automation. Direct Debit mandates and especially Recurring Pay by Bank, powered by open banking, are standing instructions with a limit attached, one that a payer can revoke at any time. This leaves them in control and with a clear record of what they agreed to. This is the structure A2A payments have run on for years with a proven track record, and it’s an excellent fit for agentic payments.
A solid foundation for the future
With agentic commerce in the early stages of development, the industry has a unique opportunity to build a solution that actually fits the way we pay and get paid in today’s digital economy. Unlike cards, which have had a series of ‘fixes’ bolted on over the years to keep up with online transactions, A2A rails are structurally better suited to agentic payments, notably with the ability to delegate authority whilst offering payer flexibility. Leaning into A2A also keeps that payment volume, and the value it carries, within the UK’s own banking infrastructure rather than handing more of it to overseas schemes, which is exactly the shift the National Payments Vision calls for: A2A as a genuine alternative to cards, not an afterthought bolted onto them.
For this vision to come to life, it needs consistent bank coverage for recurring A2A payments, clear regulatory oversight of open banking, and agent standards built on A2A from the start rather than retrofitted to cards. Agentic commerce is still taking shape, so the window to get this right is open now. Banks, regulators, providers and merchants all have a part to play in making A2A the foundation for agentic commerce.
*GoCardless Payment Success Rates, 2025
