Card payments were built on the assumption that a human is present at the moment of purchase, clicking buy or tapping a card, so the network can treat that single action as proof of consent. As AI agents start making purchases on a person’s behalf over days or weeks, that assumption breaks, and EMVCo, the body that manages the EMV specifications behind chip cards, contactless payments and 3-D Secure, published a draft framework on September 1 that tries to rebuild consent for a world where the buyer is not always a person clicking a button.
The problem: consent that has to last longer than one click
The EMV Agentic Payments Framework for Specifications, now open for public review until September 30, does not try to solve every agentic commerce scenario at once. It focuses narrowly on card based purchases where a consumer’s authorization to an AI agent needs to be tracked over time rather than confirmed once, cases like a recurring subscription an agent renews, a cumulative shopping budget it draws down against, or a return or dispute it has to handle after the original purchase closes. Those scenarios need what EMVCo calls a shared intent state, a record of what the consumer actually authorized that persists across every party in the transaction chain, not just at the instant of checkout.
Intent Services: the mechanism EMVCo is proposing
The framework’s core proposal is a layer called Intent Services, a shared and interoperable system that lets payment participants register, reference, retrieve and manage a consumer’s authorized intent before, during and after a transaction. Rather than each card issuer, merchant and wallet provider building its own private ledger of what a customer told its own agent to do, Intent Services would give the industry a common coordination point, complementing cryptographic tools like Verifiable Intent that already prove a specific instruction came from a specific person.
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“Card-based agentic payments require a globally interoperable foundation that consumers, merchants and issuers can all trust,” said Junya Tanaka, EMVCo’s Executive Committee Chair. “This publication marks an important step forward by outlining a consistent approach for establishing and communicating intent alongside payment-related information, and we encourage participants from across the industry to share their feedback to shape its ongoing development.”
Know Your Agent is still to come
The current draft stops short of standardizing how a bank or merchant identifies which specific AI agent is on the other end of a transaction. EMVCo says it may add capabilities for what it calls Know Your Agent, along with Agentic Transaction Indicators, in future publications, mechanisms that would let a payment network flag that a transaction involved an autonomous agent and communicate relevant details about that agent to the merchant or issuer. Those pieces matter for fraud and dispute handling: without a standard way to identify the agent, banks investigating a disputed charge have no consistent record of which software made the purchase or under what authorization.
Why the card networks are moving now
EMVCo’s draft is not happening in isolation. Visa and Mastercard have already been building their own agentic commerce protocols, and payments infrastructure providers have started shipping products built around the assumption that an AI agent, not a person, initiates the transaction; Stripe’s token routing work for AI agent purchases is one example already live in the market. What EMVCo adds is a specification layer that sits underneath those individual network and vendor products, the same role EMV specifications have played for chip cards and 3-D Secure for two decades: a shared technical foundation that keeps competing networks interoperable instead of each building an incompatible standard for the same problem.
That coordination matters because AI agents are moving from answering questions to actually executing transactions across the finance industry, and payments has the least room for standards fragmentation of any function they touch. A bank that gets recommendation quality wrong from an AI assistant produces an annoyed customer. A card network that gets consent tracking wrong for an autonomous agent produces a disputed charge with no clear record of who authorized it, a liability question neither issuers nor merchants want to litigate case by case.
The standards effort also reflects how quickly agentic spending has moved from pilot to infrastructure decision inside financial institutions. Banks are increasingly treating agentic AI as core financial infrastructure rather than an experimental feature bolted onto an existing product, which changes the stakes of getting the underlying payment standard wrong. A bank that built its own proprietary consent tracking last year, before EMVCo published anything, now has to decide whether to keep running that system alongside a future industry standard or migrate onto Intent Services once specifications are final, a choice that gets more expensive the longer a bank waits and the more transaction volume it has already routed through a homegrown approach.
What it means for the payments leader
For a bank or merchant payments team, the immediate action is not technical integration, the framework is still in draft and specifications will follow later. It is participation: EMVCo is taking feedback through September 30 from Associates, Subscribers and any interested stakeholder, and the shape of Intent Services, along with whatever Know Your Agent mechanism follows it, will determine what fraud liability and dispute resolution look like once agentic card payments scale. Issuers that wait for a finished specification will be integrating rules that someone else wrote into their consent and dispute workflows without having shaped them.
The near term evaluation question for any bank piloting agent initiated payments today is whether the vendor’s current consent tracking approach is built to plug into a shared intent layer later, or whether it is a proprietary system that will need to be rebuilt once EMVCo’s specifications solidify. Getting that architecture decision right now is cheaper than migrating a live agentic payments product after the industry standard lands.
Source: EMVCo
