Banks and Payment Networks Prepare for AI-Driven Commerce

Banks are given an 18-24 month window to prepare for autonomous AI purchasing, with passkeys and tokenization as critical enablers. Visa and Mastercard are developing new protocols for embedded payments, targeting a $7T market shift. The emerging agent-to-agent payment stack (x402, AP2, ACP protocols) is becoming a standardized architectural layer, with security risks around prompt injection attacks on mandates. Circle's Agent Wallet now supports x402 and USDC for AI agents, signaling competition with Coinbase. New developments: Stripe's leaked investor letter frames AI inference as a parallel currency to money, and Razorpay launched Vulcan, India's first AI payments foundation model trained on 3T data points from 4B transactions, creating a data moat. A panel on delegated commerce confirms trust must shift from credentials to intent, with stablecoins positioned as complementary to UPI. Nedbank's executive emphasizes serving both human clients and AI agents, signaling institutional readiness. This signals a concrete timeline and technical requirements for AI commerce, with implications for fintech infrastructure and agent-to-agent payments.