The Fate of Agentic Commerce Hinges on an Elusive Resource: Trust

In the past, banks and businesses could build rapport by delighting customers over several interactions. That window has largely disappeared amid the impersonal nature of today’s digital ecosystem—and the growing sophistication of fraud.

The surge in fraud and money laundering has prompted many experts to advocate for a return to a zero-trust framework, where every party must be verified before a transaction proceeds. That mandate will only grow more complex as agentic commerce gains traction and AI agents—and their intentions—must also be validated.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, FinScan’s Chris Ostrowski, Head of Product Management, and Kieran Holland, Global Head of Solutions Engineering, along with Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how these factors have placed a premium on trust.

There are tangible ways organizations can build trust in a real-time, agentic environment. Increasingly, however, those efforts must take place long before a transaction is ever executed.

Accelerating Social Change

Many artificial intelligence enhancements have been implemented behind the scenes, from workflow optimization to cybersecurity. While customer-facing tools like chatbots have been successful, asking consumers to entrust shopping and payments to AI agents requires a far greater leap of faith.

That leap comes at a time when many consumers are experiencing a crisis of confidence. Fraud attempts have become both relentless and highly convincing—and too many individuals have fallen victim.

“I always give the example of what I would say to any member of my family who says, ‘I’ve received an e-mail offering me this deal or a massive bargain,’” Holland said. “If someone came up to you in the street and said, ‘I’m a Nigerian prince who wants to give you $5,000 if you could cash that for me,’ would you trust them?”

“There’s still that social change needed, because when something is not face-to-face, I have to have certain controls and mechanisms to make me feel confident,” he said. “Maybe that change will eventually become ingrained; maybe it just won’t. Maybe us humans need a certain amount of confidence that we used to get from face-to-face interactions.”

To rebuild confidence in a digital-first environment, organizations must establish effective risk controls around payments. That task has grown more complicated amid the rapid expansion of payment types, now spanning cards, crypto, and real-time payment rails.

This proliferation has elevated payments orchestration platforms to the forefront. These platforms not only operate across multiple payments rails, but also enable businesses to intelligently route transactions to optimize authorization rates, timing, and cost.

Such optimization is no longer just a matter of efficiency. It’s foundational to establishing trust before a transaction ever occurs. It’s also a prerequisite for agentic commerce to scale meaningfully.

“With those true agentic payments, you’re trusting that individual to act on your behalf with that vendor, potentially for the first time, or even a network of vendors,” Ostrowski said.

“You have to trust through interaction, but also within access and being able to facilitate enabling the right credentialing and set of controls within it. So you don’t have your agentic AI go out and buy you 10,000 rolls of toilet paper because it was more efficient to do it that way,” he said. “You’re having to put a lot of that trust up front.”

Given the potential volume and velocity of agent-driven transactions, trust must rest on a firm foundation. Achieving that will require broad industry alignment—a necessary, though potentially challenging, step.

“One of the interesting things here is that trust means something different for each participant in a transaction like this,” Miller said. “There is what a merchant needs to trust, there’s what an issuer needs to trust, there’s what a processor needs to trust, and there’s what consumers need to trust. There’s just a lot here to think about in terms of how we can get all the participants to agree to do the transaction.”

Driving the Next Generation of E-Commerce

This industry-wide agreement between merchants and financial services firms will be paramount because the roles and responsibilities within agentic transactions remain fluid.

“You’re setting conditions around more of an event-driven architecture,” Holland said. “When something happens on this system, then do something else for me without me having to initiate it. But who defines what the criteria for that is? Who designs the guardrails around that and who—I suppose legally and philosophically—holds the responsibility for saying, ‘I want this?’ And now the AI has translated that into a set of conditions that it’s going to use.”

“It’s the same concept in fraud prevention as in retail banking,” he said. “We don’t expect the end consumer to be the perfect guardian of their own financial health. We accept a certain level of responsibility across the injury to help them in that regard. I think the same is going to be true of agentic AI.”

Like modern payments infrastructure, agentic commerce will likely include baseline controls. However, banks will still need to implement their own safeguards, policies, and compliance frameworks to protect customers and their institutions.

Larger financial institutions may need to take the lead, gradually introducing customers to agentic commerce through limited, well-defined use cases that build familiarity and confidence over time.

“You’ll probably see something similar to the use of Zelle in the U.S. where you have banks coming together and putting those safeguards around it at a common level,” Ostrowski said. “It can drive the growth of agentic AI usage within various financial services, within payments, and within retail itself.”

“You’re also going to continue to see the growth of trust registries, where you go through verification processes to be placed on the registry to show that I have proven my ability to be trusted, and that information can follow along with the agents,” he said, “especially within the blockchain space of being able to cryptographically assign transactions and agents with certain rights. All of that can be facilitated at these larger institutions that are already learning it in other areas, to help drive this next generation of e-commerce.”

The Messaging Standard

A consortium-driven approach to agentic commerce will hinge on clear, standardized communication. Although the ISO 20022 messaging protocol was not developed specifically with agentic commerce in mind, its rich, structured data model is well suited to this paradigm.

“ISO 20022 has been designed deliberately so that much clearer information is available about what this transaction is and who’s involved,” Holland said. “Whether you need to identify the name and location of the ultimate debtor, the ultimate creditor intermediaries and so on, that new standard was designed from the ground up to do that.”

“It’s important because when you look at how AI within compliance is starting to take off, data is the foundation to that,” he said. “If you haven’t got good foundational, reliable data about who’s involved and who the counterparties are, making a good, accurate, and certainly more automated decision comes with significant risk.”

A common messaging standard becomes even more critical as transactions accelerate towards real time. For example, stablecoins and agentic commerce share significant synergy: both are real-time, highly efficient, and capable of leveraging ISO 20022’s enhanced data capabilities.

For stablecoins to integrate fully into mainstream financial systems, however, transactions must embed sufficient data to distinguish them from other cryptocurrency transfers. They must also incorporate compliance-related information, including support for travel rule requirements.

“That whole sphere comes back to the standard ISO 20022 fields and that consistency we’re starting to get to be able to go forward in these various ways,” Ostrowski said.

Making the Final Decision

More advanced communication standards, efficient infrastructure, and stronger safeguards are all critical to fostering trust in an agentic commerce ecosystem. Yet none of these solutions can replace distinctly human qualities—creativity, empathy, curiosity, and judgment.

“It’s a true saying that if you design a very fixed, very structured, automated system, us humans will always find a new scenario, a new circumstance that is all of a sudden going to break it,” Holland said. “Introducing humans into it is that creativity buffer where I can see that Chris has bought 10,000 rolls of toilet paper, I can see that it meets his preferences, but I as a human know that’s unlikely.”

“That curiosity whereby humans can still intervene and say 99.9% of the time this might be right, but with my insightfulness, with my creativity, I can introduce that human factor back into this overall very tightly structured process,” he said. “I become that level of flexibility that’s not going to break the system.”

The human element won’t disappear, because AI agents are ultimately designed to act on behalf of individuals. Preferences differ widely and evolve constantly.

An AI agent may learn a consumer’s favorite restaurants, events, or airlines. But human priorities shift. Tastes change. Context matters.

In the end, even in an agent-driven economy, trust will remain deeply human.

“Maybe that day you feel like a window seat instead of an aisle seat, and your agent would say, ‘No, that’s not your typical pattern, you normally do this,’” Ostrowski said. “There’s still that level of independence that the human wants and over time the agent will try to mimic that, but you’re still never going to completely replace that.”

“It’s similar to what we’re seeing within the regulatory environment, where regulators aren’t ready to hand off agentic decisions for risk evaluation or compliance approvals to agents entirely,” he said. “They still want to see a human reviewing the cases, making decisions on whether I should onboard or reject a type of transaction. I want to be the one approving it; I want to be making that final decision. It’s doing 90% of the work for me, but I want that last 10% to stay with me.”