Acquirers May Win Agentic Commerce by Building the Guardrails

Agentic commerce has been framed as the payment industry’s next leap forward.

But the central insight emerging from “How Acquirers Prepare for Agentic Commerce,” a new PYMNTS Intelligence report commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions, reveals that agentic commerce is not a new stack.

Rather, it represents a new channel running on an existing one. That distinction matters because it reframes the challenge. Success across agentic may not depend on inventing new payment rails but on whether current infrastructure such as authentication systems, fraud models, orchestration layers and more, can all collectively stretch to accommodate a fundamentally different kind of actor.

The idea that artificial intelligence (AI) agents will browse, decide and transact on behalf of consumers is, in reality, less about transformation and more about unfinished work inside the existing payment infrastructure layers that enable transactions.

For acquirers, the financial institutions that sit between merchants and payment networks, agentic commerce is the logical extension of a decade-long push toward omnichannel commerce. The same systems that were built to unify in-store, online and mobile experiences are now expected to support transactions initiated by software agents.

The difference is not conceptual but operational. And that’s where the friction lies.

A New Channel Built on Old Foundations

For acquirers, the agentic commerce problem or challenge is less about enabling transactions and more about redefining how those transactions are governed. Identity verification, credential security and fraud prevention, which are already complex in omnichannel environments, can become even more ambiguous when decisions are made by software acting on a user’s behalf.

A fragmented infrastructure that struggles to reconcile online and offline transactions is even less equipped to handle transactions initiated by AI agents. The result is a compounding effect: the limitations of yesterday’s systems become the barriers to tomorrow’s innovation.

After all, agentic commerce is fundamentally a systems-and-trust-layer problem, not a product problem. The report found that the industry itself agrees, with over 9 in 10 acquirers citing governance and permissions, consent and data frameworks, fulfilment orchestration and cross-business coordination as their biggest agentic priorities.

What the acquirers failed to flag as their top priorities are also notable. Things like flashy AI capabilities, new payment methods and consumer UX innovation failed to move the needle in agentic preparation.

That’s because the limiting factor here is not computational capability but governance. Systems can act. The question is whether institutions are prepared to oversee that action.

Read the report: How Acquirers Prepare for Agentic Commerce

This is why many of the early investments in agentic commerce are focused not on automation but on guardrails. Explainability tools, monitoring systems and reversible transaction features are receiving more attention than fully autonomous execution. The priority is not to maximize what agents can do, but to ensure that what they do can be understood, controlled, and, if necessary, undone.

After all, for all the constraints and uncertainties, the current landscape also presents an opportunity. The hesitation that characterizes much of the industry creates space for differentiation. Acquirers that invest early in modernizing infrastructure, clarifying risk models and building governance frameworks can position themselves not just as participants in agentic commerce but as architects of it.

Agentic commerce may not be the revolution it is sometimes portrayed to be. But it is a test—of infrastructure, of coordination, and of strategic intent. And as with previous transitions in the industry, the results will be determined less by who sees the future first than by who is prepared to build it.

The challenges are real, and the outcomes are uncertain. But the history of payments suggests that the companies that shape the underlying systems often capture disproportionate value.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.