Trusting AI with Your Wallet

Welcome to Today in Payments, I’m your host, Patti Murphy, here with your weekly dose of payments notes.

Let AI Do Your Shopping

The Big Three payments companies – Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa – are in a race to the next frontier of digital commerce: agenic AI.

Each has unveiled initiatives enabling AI agents to complete purchases on behalf of consumers.

“These technologies have the potential to radically transform commerce, to radically transform how we all shop, how we all buy, and how commerce works at its most fundamental layers,” said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney during a livestreamed product unveiling. In a separate interview with Bloomberg News, McInerney said Visa’s agenic commerce offering will begin rolling out in the next few quarters.

Visa is partnering with Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others to integrate payment capabilities directly into AI chatbots. When consumers shop via chatbot, they’ll also be able to complete purchases using AI agents.

The agenic commerce initiatives include:

• Visa Intelligent Commerce

• Mastercard Agent Pay – as reported last week.

• PayPal Agent Toolkit

Tokenization plays a central role in both Visa and Mastercard’s strategies. Think of it as giving an AI agent its own credit card—but with strict parental controls. That’s how PYMNTS.com describes the trend.

PayPal is taking a slightly different approach, offering a developer toolkit and token access that allows AI agents to interact with its platform directly via APIs.

Agenic commerce promises convenience. But what about control? Several people I’ve spoken with are uneasy about the idea. The “parental controls” remind me of a friend who let her teenage son use her credit card for games, only to find out later he’d used it to access adult sites.

For this to work, trust is essential. So is transparency—consumers will want to know why an AI picked product X over product Y. At least I would. And perhaps most importantly, there need to be real-time cancellation options and strong dispute resolution protocols in place for people to embrace this shift. That’s my take.

Stablecoins for Cross-Border Payments? Visa is on it.

Visa wants to leverage stablecoins for cross-border payments.

Speaking at the NACHA conference, the card network revealed it’s working with Stripe’s stablecoin orchestration unit Bridge to support payments in Latin America. It’s also pursuing other fintech partnerships to expand stablecoin-based disbursements and financial services, according to Payments Dive.

Stablecoins—cryptocurrencies tied to fiat currency values—offer greater stability than assets like Bitcoin, making them attractive for use cases such as remittances, where traditional methods are often slow and costly.

One Visa exec said stablecoins could also be used for payroll and contractor payments. McInerney told analysts Visa had reached a milestone: $200 million in cumulative stablecoin settlement volume. Still, he noted, this remains “a very small portion of our overall settlement volume.”

Meanwhile, efforts to regulate stablecoins have stalled in the Senate. The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) remains in limbo.

Separately, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) recently ruled that banks may buy, sell, and outsource services related to crypto assets—including stablecoins.

Zelle Outage Snarls Payments

A major technical outage last weekend brought the Zelle P2P payment network to a standstill, leaving millions of users unable to send or receive funds.

The outage affected major banks including Bank of America, Truist, Capital One, and Navy Federal Credit Union. Some users even reported duplicate debits from their accounts.

Both Zelle and the affected banks pointed fingers at Fiserv, which blamed the disruption on an “internal issue” and promised corrective measures.

Here’s the kicker: the statements advised users to consider alternative platforms like Venmo, Cash App, and Apple Pay for urgent transfers.

The outage also impacted other payment services, including ACH and online bill pay.

Zelle, launched in 2017 by Early Warning Services (EWS)—a consortium of seven major U.S. banks—was meant to help traditional banks compete with fintech disruptors. Its key advantage? It enables near-instant transfers directly between bank accounts without fees, using just an email or phone number.

By 2023, Zelle had processed over $500 billion in transfers and counted more than 1,800 financial institutions in its network.

Despite its success, Zelle has faced criticism over consumer protection gaps. Last year, the CFPB sued EWS and several member banks for failing to adequately protect users from fraud. That case was later dropped, part of a broader rollback of consumer complaints under the Trump administration.

HSBC Launches Tariff Financing Tool

We knew this was coming. Just not who or when.

HSBC has launched TradePay for Import Duties, a new financing tool aimed at helping U.S. clients pay tariffs.

The tool simplifies and funds the payment of import duties through pre-agreed credit terms with brokers or direct ACH credits, the bank said.

“By settling import duties directly and frictionlessly through HSBC TradePay, our U.S. clients have more visibility and control over their working capital at the time they need it most,” said Vivek Ramachandran, Head of Global Trade Solutions at HSBC.

The move comes just as Americans brace for higher prices driven by newly announced tariffs from the Trump administration, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

That’s all for Today in Payments. Stay tuned for your weekly dose of payments notes.