Commerce at Machine Speed: The Payment Infrastructure Agentic Commerce Requires
Every payment rail built in the last fifty years carries the same assumption: a person initiates the transaction. That assumption is now being tested. The International Monetary Fund describes the shift as a move from 'click-to-pay' to 'decide-to-pay'. Agentic AI, capable of autonomous planning, tool use, decision-making, and multi-agent interaction, is changing how commercial transactions are initiated and executed.
Commerce at Machine Speed is authored by Nicole Sandler, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Ubyx, with key contributions from Amazon, Barclays, Boku, the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), Coinbase, Dfns, Digital Asset, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN), Orbital, Paxos, and Tempo.
The paper sets out the infrastructure requirements of agentic commerce and assesses which architectures best meet them. It is the first of a three-paper series.
