EMV Agentic Payments Framework

EMV Agentic Payments – Framework for Specifications is the card networks’ first common answer to the question at the center of agentic commerce: how does everyone in a card payment know that the consumer really delegated this purchase to an AI agent? EMVCo scoped it to the cases where intent has to live over time — recurring purchases, cumulative budgets, and what happens after the transaction — where a one-shot signature is not enough and participants need a shared intent state.

• Intent Services - A shared, interoperable layer for registering, referencing, retrieving and managing consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a transaction.
• Roles and data fields - An overview of the ecosystem roles and the data needed to register intent, keep its lifecycle and state, and allow authorised retrieval.
• Complements cryptographic intent - Positioned as a coordination point alongside solutions like Verifiable Intent, not a replacement for them.
• What comes next - Know Your Agent (KYA) identification and Agentic Transaction Indicators are flagged as possible future publications, along with enhancements to EMV 3DS, Payment Tokenisation, SRC and the Digital Payment Credential.
• Built with peers - Developed by a dedicated Agentic Payments Task Force in collaboration with the FIDO Alliance, the OpenID Foundation, the OpenWallet Foundation and W3C.

This is a framework, not yet a wire protocol — it is the foundation for “potential specification development,” and the draft is open for comment until 30 September 2026. What makes it worth watching is who is behind it: the six card networks, through the body that already defines the token, the cryptogram and the authentication step. When agent payment protocols from individual companies meet card rails, this is where the shared vocabulary for intent is likely to come from.

Industry: Payments