Over the past year, a wave of new agentic payment startups and partnerships have emerged — but these companies don’t always look like traditional fintechs.
At the start of 2025, Mastercard announced a partnership with Microsoft and other AI platforms to launch its Agentic Payments Program. Months later, fintech giant Stripe partnered with OpenAI to allow US users to make payments using ChatGPT.
European AI agent startups have already raised €1bn this year across 54 deals, according to Sifted data, a steady advance towards the €6bn raised in all of 2025.
This rise in agentic payment is often described as “the new wave of fintech innovation,” according to Roy Asiedu, fintech banker in the J.P. Morgan Innovation Economy group, which provides specialised support to tech companies ranging from startups to scale-ups, and VCs. But in reality it represents a deeper shift away from interfaces and software, and towards infrastructure itself.
“What matters now is no longer who builds the most elegant user experience but who provides programmable rails, policy-driven permissions and infrastructure capable of operating safely at scale,” Asideu says. “Agentic payments look less like a new fintech product and more like the next evolution of financial infrastructure.”
"The most immediate value is not in consumer user experience, but infrastructure where automation, compliance, and scale matter most."
What makes these startups different from other fintechs?
Agentic payment startups are starting to move away from consumer-facing products altogether and focusing more on the systems that run them, signalling an emergence of a new fintech category, says Asiedu.
“Early fintech innovation focused heavily on user experience and better interfaces layered on top of existing banking rails. Agentic payments flip that logic. The most immediate value is not in consumer user experience, but infrastructure where automation, compliance and scale matter most.
“Many agentic payment startups are focusing on B2B, treasury and enterprise workflows, where agents can autonomously initiate, route, approve or reconcile payments under predefined rules.”
Examples of international fintechs focused on infrastructure include GoCardless, Airwallex and Payrails, with the latter raising $32m in its latest funding round in June 2025.
Infrastructure such as API, permissions and policy engines are becoming increasingly important for these startups, according to Antonis Themistokleous, fintech banker in J.P. Morgan’s Innovation Economy group.
At the same time, innovation often happens faster in parallel ecosystems including blockchain, decentralised finance and new protocol-based models where legacy constraints are less binding.
“Decisions are delegated to software agents operating continuously and at scale,” he says. “APIs become the primary interface, enabling seamless integration between agents, banks, and payment networks. Permissions and policy engines define what agents are allowed to do, under what conditions and with what limits.”
Visual design is increasingly a secondary consideration for these startup. Instead programmability, orchestration and trust are becoming more important. Agentic payments require infrastructure that is built on safety and reliability rather than needing human review.
In Themistokleous’ view, the future of agentic payments will likely be a hybrid model of partnerships with banks and parallel innovation ecosystems.
“Banks bring regulatory compliance, balance sheets, access to payment rails and decades of risk management experience,” he says. “These are critical for trust and scale. At the same time, innovation often happens faster in parallel ecosystems including blockchain, decentralised finance and new protocol-based models where legacy constraints are less binding. Scalable models in the future will likely require both.”
Agentic payment regulations
Despite the speed of innovation unfolding, the regulation of agentic payments remains complex.
Most existing payment regulations assume a human initiates a transaction, but agentic payments are challenging this assumption, explains Asiedu.
“Questions around liability, consent and fraud become more complex when software agents act independently,” he says. “Regulators are beginning to engage with these issues, but standards and frameworks are still evolving.”
This transition will push the industry toward more sophisticated, multi-agent systems and will require a mindset shift.
Over the next few years, startups in this space should see clearer rules around agent permissions, accountability and governance emerging, all of which will reinforce the need for robust infrastructure rather than lightweight applications.
Many fintech founders and leaders still underestimate the complexity and risk involved with agentic payments, says Themistokleous. Using autonomous payment methods forces organisations to consider factors such as liability, controls and data integrity.
“This transition will push the industry toward more sophisticated, multi-agent systems and will require a mindset shift from managing products to governing autonomous financial infrastructure.”
The future of agentic payments
As fintech continues to evolve, trusted infrastructure will be the advantage that sets successful agentic payment startups apart.
These agents require confidence from banks, businesses, regulators and users that they will act exactly as intended, says Themistokleous.
“This places a premium on secure APIs, robust policy engines, operational resilience and transparent auditability”, he says. “Trusted infrastructure is no longer a supporting layer; it becomes the core competitive advantage.”
It’s becoming obvious the shifting advantage from feature velocity to trust, control and resilience at scale.
“From a bank’s perspective, agentic payments sit at the intersection of payments, treasury, compliance and automation. JP Morgan is actively discussing with founders how agentic systems change payment initiation, controls, liability and trust and how infrastructure needs to evolve to support this shift safely at scale.”
Agentic payments mark a “quiet but fundamental shift in financial services,” adds Asiedu. As automation increases, the focus will shift from front-end products to the infrastructure that allows these agents to act safely, compliantly and predictably.
“Success in this space will depend less on feature velocity and more on trust: embedded controls, transparent auditability and resilient systems that can support autonomous decision-making at scale,” he says.
“Ultimately, agentic payments are not redefining fintech products and services as much as they are redefining the infrastructure on which modern financial systems will be built. It’s becoming obvious the shifting advantage from feature velocity to trust, control and resilience at scale.”
