Research brief · agent payments
EMVCo's agentic payments framework makes a hard problem explicit: an agent can hold a valid credential while its authority to spend has changed.
On 1 September 2026, EMVCo released a draft framework for card-based agentic payments and opened it for public comment through 30 September. The central proposal is an interoperable layer called Intent Services: shared state that payment participants can use to understand consumer-authorised intent when an AI agent acts later, repeatedly, or across several transactions.
Published 11 September 2026 · draft released 1 September · public comment closes 30 September 2026 · primary sources below
1 Sep 2026
EMVCo released Framework for Specifications v1.0 DRAFT
30 Sep 2026
Public comment deadline
Intent Services
Proposed shared state for delegated purchasing authority
What EMVCo is trying to solve
A valid card credential does not prove that this purchase still matches the user's instructions
Traditional payment systems can authenticate a credential and authorise a transaction. Agentic commerce adds another stateful question: whether the software is still acting inside authority granted earlier. That authority may span recurring purchases, a cumulative budget, or activity that continues after the user leaves the session.
EMVCo says those cases can require a shared intent state across multiple participants and interactions. Intent Services are proposed as a common layer where authorised participants can register, reference, retrieve and manage that intent before, during and after payment.
The draft is deliberately a framework rather than a final scheme rule. EMVCo says it may inform future enhancements to EMV 3-D Secure, Payment Tokenisation, Secure Remote Commerce and Digital Payment Credentials.
Intent Services in plain English
The proposal separates proof of authority from the current state of authority
Register
Record the consumer-authorised intent and the information participants need to interpret it.
Reference
Carry a stable reference to that intent through the transaction rather than copying an uncontrolled instruction everywhere.
Retrieve
Allow authorised participants to obtain the relevant intent data when they need to make a payment or risk decision.
Manage
Maintain lifecycle and state as delegated authority is used, changed, revoked or enters post-transaction activity.
Card-based intent vs machine-native payment
EMVCo and x402 operate at different layers, but their safety problems increasingly rhyme
EMVCo's current work is about a consumer delegating card-payment authority. x402 is designed for software to encounter machine-readable payment requirements on an HTTP resource. One should not be presented as a replacement for the other. Builders increasingly need both kinds of controls: identity and intent around who may act, plus deterministic payment and delivery semantics at execution time.
| Dimension | EMVCo card-agent pattern | x402-style machine purchase |
|---|---|---|
| Authority | Consumer delegates purchasing intent to an AI agent | Agent spends inside wallet or treasury policy |
| Primary surface | Card-based merchant checkout | Machine-readable API or HTTP resource |
| Shared state | Intent can persist across participants and time | Payment requirements and settlement evidence travel with requests |
| Identity question | Which agent acted for which consumer? | Which agent or buyer wallet is permitted to spend? |
| Failure question | Was the purchase still inside delegated intent? | Did payment and delivery complete exactly once? |
What is proposed — and what is not
Intent Services are proposed
The September draft describes the shared layer, roles, data fields, lifecycle/state information and authorised retrieval of intent-related data.
KYA is future work
EMVCo says future work may consider Know Your Agent capabilities. The September framework does not itself create a universal KYA standard.
Agentic indicators are future work
A consistent signal that an AI agent acted for a consumer is a possible future direction, not a field implementers can assume exists today.
Existing EMV rails are not already changed
The framework may inform future 3DS, tokenisation, SRC and DPC enhancements. It does not mean those specifications have already been revised.
Why the timing matters
Identity and delegated intent are converging into one agent-commerce trust stack
The EMVCo draft arrived days before a separate 10 September collaboration by Visa, Mastercard and Ant International on interoperable Know Your Agent principles, while India's NPCI is separately developing an AI-agent registry for UPI. These are different initiatives, but together they show the same architectural pressure: participants need machine-readable evidence of who the agent is, whose authority it carries, what limits apply and whether that authority is still valid.
For the identity side of that stack, read zFinia's Know Your Agent research brief.