Let’s talk about the fourteen days left to say something about what your AI agent is allowed to buy — and about who is actually using them.
At the start of this month, EMVCo — the body that writes the card specifications nearly every payment terminal on earth settles on — published a framework for card-based agentic payments and opened it up for industry feedback. That window closes on the thirtieth of September.
In the same fortnight the FIDO Alliance was drafting interoperability standards for the same territory. Anthropic shipped commerce-agent blueprints with Shopify, Visa and Mastercard attached. Visa kept extending its payment passkeys into agent commerce.
Four separate efforts. One question underneath all of them: how does a merchant know that this machine is authorised to act for this human?
I’m not going to relitigate that question today. I’m interested in the window, because the window has a deadline on it and almost nobody is standing in it.
Think about how a standard actually gets written, because it’s less dramatic than people assume.
There’s a working group. There’s a mailing list with a subject line that doesn’t change for months. Somewhere there’s a PDF with numbered clauses, and a comment template, and a note in small print explaining that feedback must be submitted in the specified format by the closing date.
That note is the whole thing. That small print is where a rule gets its shape.
Now picture the two sides of it.
On one side: a compliance team at a card network, a product lawyer at a platform, a standards engineer at a processor with a slide deck and three paragraphs of proposed wording. They will file. Filing is their job. They’ve been in this working group since the second meeting.
On the other side: a woman who owns one shop, or four, and who has just spent two years getting her products into every channel she can find. She’s read a headline about agents buying things. She assumes, reasonably, that someone is handling the details. She has never once in her life filed a comment on a technical specification, and no part of her week is shaped around doing it.
The document closes anyway. And whatever’s in it in October becomes the default for years — because defaults don’t get revisited. They get inherited.
That’s what makes this week worth ten minutes of your attention.
Two decisions are effectively being made inside those clauses, and neither of them sounds like a decision about you.
The first is what proof travels with the purchase. When a machine buys a thing in the middle of the night, what does the merchant receive that says: this agent, this version, this scope, on behalf of this person. Whatever that answer turns out to be, it becomes a requirement. Requirements become fields. Fields become software somebody has to buy, integrate, and keep current.
The second is who’s allowed to be on the other end of it. Every payment standard in history has done the same thing eventually — it decides who can accept money and on what terms. Sometimes that’s a security upgrade. Sometimes it’s a quiet filter that removes the smallest participants first, because they’re the ones who can’t absorb another certification, another gateway integration, another monthly line item for something that used to be free.
And here’s the thing about a comment period that most operators never internalise.
It is the last moment you have leverage over a rule that will outlive the consultation.
Before a specification is final, a written, specific, technical objection from the class of business it would hurt has real weight. Standards bodies are defensive about being seen to ignore affected participants; it’s part of how their authority survives. They can’t easily wave off a comment that says: this clause breaks my checkout, here’s how, here’s what it costs me, here’s the wording that would fix it.
After the specification is final, that same argument becomes a complaint. Complaints go to a different department, in a different tone, usually a year late, usually to a regulator who wasn’t in the room either.
Same words. Completely different outcome. The only thing that changed is the date.
Which brings me to the part that’s easy to miss if you don’t live inside the payments world.
South African merchants don’t get a South African version of these rules. Local gateways and acquirers do a lot of work, but the underlying specifications — the ones that decide how a transaction is proven, formatted, and accepted — come from the same international bodies, on the same timeline. So the comment window that closes on the thirtieth of September is not somebody else’s compliance exercise. It’s the shape of your checkout in about eighteen months. Just with no local voice attached to it, because local operators assume their acquirer is representing them. Their acquirer is representing the acquirer’s interests. That’s not a scandal. That’s an org chart.
So what do you actually do with this. Three things, and they’re small.
If you sell anything, go read what’s been published. Not the whole framework — the sections about what a merchant is expected to verify and what a machine has to present. Ten minutes. You’re looking for one thing: does the ordinary version of your business still work on the other side of it.
Then file something. A page in your own words, in plain language, describing one concrete case they didn’t think about. What you sell, what this clause would cost you, and the smaller wording you’d accept instead. You don’t need to sound like an engineer. You need to sound like the operator the clause forgot.
And if you’re building on any of this — an agent, a checkout, an ordering flow — keep one design constraint in front of you the whole time. The human’s own authority should be the thing that’s verifiable. Not the network’s permission slip for you.
Here’s the test I’d run against every draft that comes out of these groups. Can the person who granted the agent permission take it back — without cancelling a card, closing an account, or abandoning the channel they built their business on? If the answer is no, then what’s being standardised isn’t consent. It’s access with a nicer name on it.
And one more, quieter.
Every default in your life was written by somebody. Somebody decided how long a chargeback takes, what a declined transaction looks like, what a merchant must collect before money moves. You inherited all of it. You didn’t agree to any of it. Most of it works fine, which is exactly why nobody ever asks.
This one is still open for fourteen days. That’s rare. Most of these decisions arrive already finished.
A default written in a room you skipped is still your rule. The only difference is that you don’t get to describe the problem in the words you’d have used.