The Secure Technology Alliance and Merchant Advisory Group have partnered to align the payments industry on secure agentic commerce.
The partnership follows the launch of the Alliance’s Agentic Trust and Commerce Forum. The Alliance and its forums will work with the Merchant Advisory Group (MAG) and its members to align payments and identity stakeholders on how AI agents start, authenticate, and complete transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses. Areas of focus include reducing false declines, defining the data merchants must share to enable AI-driven purchases, and determining how payment cards are selected during agentic transactions.
Merchant input on AI-initiated transactions
According to the organisations, agentic commerce adds complexity across checkout, authorisation, and post-transaction processes. An AI agent may act on a consumer’s earlier instruction or interpret their intent in real time, while completing purchases through systems designed for transactions initiated by people. This raises practical questions about how identity and authentication signals should be shared, and where liability sits when something goes wrong.
Itai Sela, Chair of the Alliance Board, stated that the forum was created because AI-initiated transactions cannot succeed in isolation, and that the industry needs a full view of their impact. According to Sela, merchants are closest to the customer experience and will be the first to deal with issues related to customer intent, fraud, and disputes, so the partnership helps ensure agentic commerce works for everyday transactions.
Frameworks before protocols fragment
John Drechny, CEO of the MAG, stated that AI-enabled buying could transform commerce, and that working with the Alliance offers an opportunity to build frameworks that protect consumers, support merchants, and strengthen the wider ecosystem. The MAG represents more than 200 merchants across sectors including airlines, retail, restaurants, insurance, grocery, and software, in North America, Europe, and Asia.
The two organisations aim to shape agentic commerce while it is still at an early stage, before emerging protocols and market practices become fragmented. The Alliance is also inviting large language model developers, fraud prevention companies, and other AI businesses to take part. Consumer trust remains a further challenge, with a SEON survey finding that half of surveyed US adults are uncomfortable with AI agents using their card details.
