Agentic Commerce: Pathways to Closing the Trust Gap

Agentic commerce moved from feature to production in barely eighteen months — from AI-assisted purchasing in early 2025 to the first production-grade agentic transaction run on full banking rails in June 2026. But the infrastructure underneath is still fragmented: at least half a dozen competing protocols govern identity, authorization, and payment — and the platforms actually processing agent transactions haven't converged on any of them.

From the standards that can bind an agent to accountable identity, to the platforms that process its transactions, to the frameworks that would assign liability when one goes wrong, this roundtable convenes financial institutions, payment processors, standard-setting bodies, and compliance and enforcement bodies to discuss what each party would need to adopt, require, or share to close the trust gap, and on what timeline.

1.     Technical: As governance moves upstream from point-of-sale to point-of-mandate, what are the strategies for constraining agent behaviour?

2.     Legal: When an agent transacts outside its mandate, how should liability be assigned across customer, platform, model provider, or payment network?

3.     Governance: At least six protocols now compete to govern agent identity, authorization, and payment — is real convergence underway, or is fragmentation the permanent state until one network effect wins?