Fintech

For years, the “agent economy” has been a thought experiment. Researchers and futurists asked: what happens when AI agents can spend money, sign contracts, and act on behalf of businesses without human intervention at every step? Today, Meow Technologies made that question significantly more concrete. The San Francisco fintech announced the launch of what it describes as the first agentic banking platform — a financial infrastructure layer designed not for humans, but for AI agents acting as autonomous business actors. ...

The payments infrastructure problem for agentic AI is real: when an AI agent makes a purchase on your behalf, how does the merchant know it was actually authorized? How does your bank verify the agent followed your instructions? How do you audit what happened afterward? On Thursday, Mastercard announced its answer: Verifiable Intent, an open-source, standards-based framework for agentic commerce. What Verifiable Intent Does Verifiable Intent addresses three things that current payment infrastructure doesn’t handle well for AI agents: ...

The agentic commerce infrastructure stack just took a meaningful step forward. Klarna and Stripe today announced that Klarna’s Buy Now, Pay Later options will be supported through Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) — meaning AI agents can now complete BNPL checkout flows on behalf of users without ever handling raw card details. Affirm also joined the SPT ecosystem on the same day, signaling that this isn’t a one-off integration — it’s the beginning of a standardized payment delegation layer for AI-driven shopping. ...