According to a research report recently released by investment bank Bernstein, the launch of Meta's (META.US) Muse has opened a new era and a new round of competition for consumer artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Bernstein believes that along the path of agent commercialization, payments may become more strategically important, and the next major battle in the payments industry may be about to begin.
Bernstein pointed out that as agent commercialization evolves rapidly, payments are also keeping pace. Muse has already been used to perform various tasks: shopping (which Meta says is rapidly becoming one of its largest usage drivers), tracking prices after booking flights and hotels, making reservations, cleaning up inboxes, and coordinating outfits. However, the payment experience for agents is still somewhat clumsy. At checkout, Muse fills in the merchant's own checkout page through Stripe's Link or Shop Pay. AI agent startup Instinct says 40% of its users share personal credit cards within three weeks, but its early users may be more tech-oriented and higher-income than average consumers.
The fundamental question surrounding consumer AI agents in the payments industry is this: in an agentic world, who will control payments, liability, and dispute resolution frameworks? What role will payment networks and PSPs (payment service providers such as Stripe and Adyen) play? Will this create incremental revenue opportunities (for example, for V/MA, Adyen, and Stripe), or will certain payment processors face commoditization risk if payments are abstracted or tokenized?
Trust remains a major bottleneck for agentic commerce, with only 23% of U.S. consumers saying they trust generative AI to handle payments on their behalf. Traditional business models are designed around a "human in the loop." In a world where agents crawl the internet, fill out forms, and buy goods, a series of questions surrounds trust: How do people know an agent is a "good agent"? How is transaction programmability achieved? How is identity verification carried out (for example, Europe's two-factor authentication, or 2FA)? How are user consent and user intent ensured? How is the liability framework designed? How are disputes handled? How is fraud risk reduced? How are chargebacks managed? How are audit trails established? How are different payment methods optimized? How is personalization achieved? And how are standards and technological fragmentation addressed?
The struggle over control of agent transactions is about to unfold around control over agent transactions and control over credentials/payment tokens. Agents bring far greater complexity to a transaction than before. In the era of agentic commerce, trust and governance are crucial, even more important than in e-commerce, and also highly challenging. Entities that can provide agent credentials/tokens and the related governance mechanisms will gain enormous benefits.
To be fair, agentic commerce still accounts for a very small share of e-commerce, but it is developing rapidly, and payment companies are preparing for an agentic world. Visa (V.US) and Mastercard (MA.US), the two major payment networks, have both launched agent tokens (Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay), with token credentials that include more data and contextual information, such as deeper insight into transaction type, where tokens are used, and payer identity, while also adding safeguards such as signals based on behavioral history and related configurations. At present, adoption of these products and whether issuers are actively participating, for example around agent controls and liability frameworks, remain unclear. In any case, 100% of agent transactions will be tokenized, though not necessarily using agent-specific tokens.
At the same time, Stripe launched Secured Payment Tokens (SPT) for agent transactions a year ago. It should be noted that Muse or Instinct services most likely do not yet use Visa and Mastercard's "agent-specific" tokens, but instead use Link or one-time virtual cards. This means payment networks can still capture these transactions, but cannot capture the lucrative "agent" token business, which in the future could become a platform for distributing services to agents. Muse transactions are also covered by Link purchase protection.
Interestingly, Visa noted in July that it had established a partnership with Meta to use agent tokens within Facebook and Instagram, but no specific information was found specifically about Muse. Whether payment networks can take the lead in agent transactions through "agent tokens" may ultimately depend on two words: liability shift. Even if other tokens are technically equally advanced, or even more advanced, payment networks still play a key role in dispute handling and liability frameworks, and this may become extremely important in agentic commerce.
Is history a guide? The struggle for control over agent transactions has similarities to the token wars of 2014. Twelve years ago, with the launch of Apple Pay, Visa and Mastercard also launched their own token services. At that time, a major battle erupted over who would control tokens, with competition among payment networks, issuers, and PSPs. Today, although multiple types of tokens coexist, payment network tokens have gained widespread adoption and now account for 60% of e-commerce transactions. Tokenization has also given payment networks a genuine leading position, enabling them to distribute their services through this channel, such as providing fraud scores, automatically updating payment credentials, and push provisioning issuer credentials to merchants. Now they are finally beginning to price these services, and there is still a long runway for pricing growth in the future.
The potential market opportunity may be enormous. The scale of potential revenue could be very substantial. For example, Stripe currently charges 0.15 cents for SPT. Once payment networks' agent tokens gain widespread adoption, they can distribute their own services through these tokens. In an optimistic scenario, if agent transactions eventually account for around a mid-single-digit to high-single-digit percentage of overall consumer transactions, this could contribute several percentage points of growth for payment networks.
What deserves attention? Factors to watch include: issuer and merchant system integration, rather than simply being switched on by default; the holiday shopping season, and agent adoption; new platform partnerships; whether Google or Meta's Muse will implement agent tokens; and agent experiences launched by banks, such as Amex and Chase. By the way, and this is also instructive for platforms, these recently launched agent products currently do not let agents control merchant payments, or take on the Merchant of Record role. At least it is fair to say that this model is quite complex. Instead, these products mainly provide consumers with a frictionless way to complete tasks and shop, for example Muse completing payments through Link or one-time virtual cards.
Merchant system integration faces serious difficulties, and controlling the checkout experience, which usually belongs to merchants, also faces many challenges, including managing conversion rates, real-time pricing, post-purchase service, merchant catalog and inventory synchronization, applying loyalty and discounts, fulfillment, and multiple shopping baskets.
Investment implications. Bernstein believes payments are a beneficiary, not a loser, and that in a world of consumer AI agents, payments may become even more strategically important. One possible scenario is that in the future consumers conduct more transactions through agents, with smaller basket sizes and greater long-tail product discovery, which would benefit payment companies, including card payment networks. In addition, agents can also drive further increases in online penetration for complex services and certain retail categories. This may be less intuitive, but higher e-commerce penetration is usually very favorable for cards, because cards have higher online penetration, as well as a higher attach rate for value-added services, or VAS.
Consumer AI agents may also mean more complexity in agent identity verification/authentication, consumer intent, dispute handling, and agent-specific cards/limits. Therefore, this also creates opportunities for V/MA and payment processors such as Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout to differentiate themselves and provide value-added services. It should be noted that 100% of agent transactions will be tokenized, which means V/MA may earn higher revenue per transaction and also gain a channel to distribute more services. Agent-to-agent commercial transactions may also emerge later, which could require a richer set of services and therefore also form a positive factor.
Bernstein has been thinking deeply about this issue and believes digital wallets such as PayPal are in an interesting position in the consumer AI agent space and have strategic options, for example if agents struggle to find an effective commercialization model. On the one hand, if agents handle people's payments, will people really still care about the friction of "guest checkout"? On the other hand, two-sided wallets like PayPal (PYPL.US) can significantly expand their value proposition, including trust, protection, fraud prevention, and dispute handling, while also helping consumers dynamically find cost-saving opportunities, rewards, and personalized services, and optimize payment methods, such as choosing between BNPL, credit cards, and debit cards.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers such as Affirm (AFRM.US) and Klarna (KLAR.US) may also be favorably positioned, especially in the following areas: interest-bearing loans for near-prime and subprime customers, including costs such as late fees; dynamic credit underwriting, and whether terms can be negotiated with agents; 0% APR loans, for example for prime customers; and terms transparency.
In its research report, Bernstein gave "outperform" ratings to Visa, Mastercard, Affirm, Adyen (ADYEY.US), Block (XYZ.US), and Toast (TOST.US); and "market perform" ratings to PayPal, FIS (FIS.US), Fiserv (FISV.US), Global Payments (GPN.US), and Klarna.
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