AI Agents Become the Next Payments Customer

The payments industry has devoted much effort to making sure a bot can’t pass for a customer. Agentic commerce brings a new complication, as some bots are supposed to buy things.

SolvaPay, a Stockholm-based FinTech, is building payment infrastructure for artificial intelligence agents. Its work includes machine-readable payments, usage-based billing and transactions between agents, along with controls over what an agent can spend.

SolvaPay CEO and Co-Founder Viggo Stenseth said he sees payments as one of the places where AI’s expanding ability to act on its own runs into systems built for people. An agent can find information, use software and complete a task, but moving money still carries assumptions about who’s on the other side of the transaction.

“We built really robust systems to verify that there’s a human doing the transaction, 3DS, CVV codes, everything to prevent a bad bot from doing things,” Stenseth said. “So, it’s really ingrained in the infrastructure.”

Merchants can’t simply discard those protections because an automated buyer has permission to spend. They still need to distinguish an authorized agent from malicious software while determining whose money the agent can use and what it’s allowed to buy.