EMVCo opens comment period on first agentic payments framework draft

EMVCo published a draft framework document titled EMV® Agentic Payments: Framework for Specifications v1.0 on 1 September 2026, opening a formal industry comment period that closed on 30 September 2026. The release marks the first structured attempt by the card-network-owned standards body to address how payment systems should handle transactions initiated by artificial intelligence agents acting on behalf of consumers.

A Framework, Not Yet a Specification

The document is explicitly a framework for future specification development rather than a finished technical standard. That distinction matters: EMVCo is inviting the industry to shape what will follow, not ratifying rules already in place. Oliver Manahan, director of engagement and operations at EMVCo, told PYMNTS that the framework "does not define the business rules, in other words, how a product is used" — a signal that commercial implementation decisions remain firmly outside the document's current scope.

EMVCo is collectively owned by six payment networks — American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa — and its existing portfolio of specifications covers EMV contact and contactless chip, EMV 3-D Secure, EMV Payment Tokenisation, EMV Secure Remote Commerce and EMV QR Codes.

EMVCo's director of engagement and operations has indicated that the agentic payments framework deliberately stops short of defining how products built on it would actually work in practice — leaving commercial and business-rule questions to be resolved downstream.

The Intent Services Concept

The framework's central technical proposal is a concept called Intent Services: a shared layer for registering, referencing, retrieving and managing consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a transaction. The proposal attempts to address a fundamental challenge in agentic commerce — establishing that a human consumer genuinely sanctioned a purchase that an AI agent subsequently executes, potentially at a remove in time from the original authorisation moment.

Secondary coverage of the draft, including reporting by Global Fintech Edge, Agentic Commerce Atlas and Stellagent, describes Intent Services as operating across distinct stages of a transaction lifecycle — from the point at which an agent is configured by a consumer, through to the moment a payment message is transmitted and ultimately verified at authorisation. The Fin Desk notes that this technical characterisation derives from secondary sources and EMVCo's own public descriptions; the full specification document was not independently read in preparing this article.*

Secondary coverage also characterises Intent Services as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, existing card-payment security mechanisms — though this framing originates from a single secondary source and cannot be independently corroborated against the primary document.

Why Regulators and Infrastructure Providers Are Watching

The arrival of agentic commerce as a mainstream payments question carries regulatory weight across multiple jurisdictions. In editorial terms, analysts note that rules governing liability and authorisation in payment systems were written with human-initiated transactions in mind. When a software agent books, buys or subscribes autonomously, questions of consumer consent, dispute rights and merchant liability become materially harder to resolve under existing frameworks. A shared technical layer for capturing and transmitting consumer intent — if it ultimately reaches specification and adoption — would give regulators, networks, issuers and acquirers a common reference point for those questions.

What Comes Next

EMVCo's invitation for public comment closed at the end of September 2026. How feedback from industry participants will be incorporated, and on what timeline the organisation intends to advance from framework to formal specification, has not been stated in publicly available material reviewed for this article. Development of any resulting specification would involve EMVCo's member networks and associate participants, consistent with the body's established structure.

Editorial disclosure: The technical contents of EMV® Agentic Payments: Framework for Specifications v1.0 were assessed for this article via EMVCo's own public announcements and descriptions, and secondary coverage from Global Fintech Edge, Agentic Commerce Atlas, Stellagent and PYMNTS. The full specification document was not independently read. Claims characterising the document's internal technical architecture are attributed to those sources accordingly.