What happened. EMVCo, the standards body behind EMV card specifications, has released a draft titled framework for agentic payment specifications and set up an Agentic Payments Task Force. Task force chair Clinton Allen described the work in an EMV Insights post dated September 1, and feedback on the draft was due by Wednesday, September 30.

The draft introduces “Intent Services.” Allen writes that these provide a shared, interoperable layer that lets payment participants register, reference, retrieve and manage consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a transaction. The framework sets out ecosystem roles and data fields for registering intent, keeping lifecycle and state information, and retrieving intent-related data with authorisation.

Why it matters. EMVCo is focused on card-based scenarios where intent has to be managed over time, such as recurring purchases, cumulative budgets and post-transaction activity. A consumer may tell an agent to buy within set limits and not be present when the payment runs. That can require a shared intent state across multiple participants. The draft aims to complement existing cryptographic assurance such as Verifiable Intent with a common coordination point.

EMVCo also says it may consider Know Your Agent capabilities and Agentic Transaction Indicators. Those would identify the agent, communicate its attributes and signal that it acted for a consumer. Allen says the framework will help identify future enhancements to EMV 3-D Secure, Payment Tokenisation, Secure Remote Commerce and the Digital Payment Credential. EMVCo has also worked with the FIDO Alliance, the OpenID Foundation, the OpenWallet Foundation and W3C.

Our read. This part is our analysis. A shared intent record across merchants, issuers and networks has to be hosted by someone, and that host becomes a dependency in every payment that uses it. Issuers and merchants should ask who will host it and who answers when it is wrong. The consumer side is covered in our report that consumers will let AI shop but not pay yet, and our opinion on agent shopping needing a refund rule covers what happens after a disputed purchase.

Source: EMVCo