When Your AI Orders Coffee: Why Agentic Payments Are Finance's Most Thrilling Yet Terrifying Frontier

By Jeremy Rodgers, Founder of Contentifai

Your phone pings at 8:47 on Tuesday morning. "Running late. Ordered your flat white from Costa on Church Street instead of Pret. Queue's shorter. Ready when you arrive. Charged to Mastercard ending 4782."

You didn't open an app. You didn't tap anything. You didn't even ask. Your AI agent simply knew. And paid.

This isn't speculation. As of this morning, it's reality. India launched the world's first national pilot integrating its UPI network directly into ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Europe's financial institutions face a question nobody asked five years ago: What happens when your AI has spending power?

From Conversation to Transaction

Think about how you pay for things now. Even the slickest mobile checkout requires you to click "buy". Agentic payments flip that entirely. Your AI shops, pays, and confirms everything before you've thought about opening an app. As Javelin Strategy & Research puts it, we're moving "beyond card-not-present to person-not-present" (Visa, 2025). The AI agent becomes the buyer.

The race to build this infrastructure is already on.

Mastercard Agent Pay launched in April 2025, partnering with Microsoft, Stripe, and Google. Their example: a woman planning her 30th birthday party chats with an AI about outfit ideas. The AI curates selections from multiple retailers, checks the weather forecast, and completes purchases across merchants. No apps. No checkout pages (Mastercard, 2025).

Google's AP2 Protocol brings together over 60 organizations including American Express, PayPal, and Coinbase. It creates cryptographically signed "intent mandates" providing proof you authorised each transaction (Lexology, 2025).

Visa Intelligent Commerce uses tokenised credentials with spending controls and authentication. Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product Officer, frames the challenge: "These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well" (Visa, 2025).

Boston Consulting Group identifies agentic AI as one of five structural forces reshaping global payments, which BCG projects will reach $2.4 trillion by 2029 (BCG, 2025). This is the future of how money moves.

India's Live Experiment

This morning's announcement represents payments' biggest shift since contactless. India's National Payments Corporation (NPCI), Razorpay, and OpenAI launched agentic payments on ChatGPT, with BigBasket as the first merchant (Reuters, 2025).

You tell ChatGPT: "Help me order ingredients for a Thai-style vegetable curry for four people from BigBasket." The AI checks catalogues, presents options, and completes the purchase via India's UPI network. Everything happens inside the chat window (Business Standard, 2025).

And the scale is staggering. UPI processes over 20 billion transactions monthly (Economic Times, 2025). Unlike Europe, where payments fragment across multiple rails, India runs on a single government-backed infrastructure.

The stated goal is evaluating "how UPI can enable AI agents with payment credentials to autonomously complete transactions on behalf of users in a safe, secure, and user-controlled manner" (Business Standard, 2025). Notice that word: autonomously. Your AI isn't asking permission for every click.

India isn't experimenting in a vacuum. It's ChatGPT's second-largest market. OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT Go at ₹399 ($4.57) monthly with UPI support, removing barriers for millions who lack credit cards (TechCrunch, 2025).

Europe's Regulatory Maze

Europe won't find replicating India's approach straightforward. The reasons go deeper than different payment infrastructures.

European payments fragment across Visa, Mastercard, SEPA, national schemes, and open banking APIs. Then add currency complications between eurozone and non-euro countries. But the real barriers are regulatory.

As law firm Linklaters observes: "Existing UK payments regulation and our current payment infrastructure are designed for human-initiated transactions" (Linklaters, 2025). Everything breaks when AI becomes the buyer.

PSD2's Strong Customer Authentication assumes a human verifies each transaction. How does that work when your AI agent buys something while you're in a meeting? PSD3, currently under debate, must clarify whether AI agents can satisfy authorisation requirements (Linklaters, 2025).

GDPR creates further complications. Agentic AI continuously learns and adapts, potentially violating purpose limitation principles. When AI makes emergent decisions, explaining them under transparency requirements becomes genuinely difficult. Data minimisation clashes with AI's need for real-time information (Kennedy's Law, 2025).

The EU AI Act adds another layer. Agentic payment systems likely qualify as high-risk AI, triggering strict requirements: Article 12 demands record-keeping, Article 13 requires transparency, Article 14 mandates "effective human oversight" (CMS Law Now, 2025).

Article 5 prohibits AI that manipulates behaviour or exploits vulnerabilities. Where's the line between "helpfully suggesting you reorder coffee beans" and "manipulating behaviour"?

The liability question towers over everything. When an AI agent errs, who's responsible? The user? The developer? The payment provider? The protocol? Linklaters puts it plainly: "The use of an AI agent within the contracting process raises questions as to the valid formation of these contracts" (Linklaters, 2025).

These aren't theoretical puzzles. They're immediate barriers preventing European deployment at India's scale.

The Business Model Earthquake

McKinsey's analysts understand what's actually at stake: two core revenue engines for traditional financial institutions face existential threats (McKinsey, 2025).

Credit cards work because of inertia. You get a card, maybe earn some points, stick with it. You're not constantly calculating optimal rewards. AI agents will be. They'll automatically route each purchase to whichever card offers the best terms in that moment. In North America, where interchange fees range from 1.30% to 3.25%, the arbitrage opportunity becomes massive (McKinsey, 2025).

As open banking expands, AI agents can bypass card networks entirely through account-to-account payments. Why pay interchange when direct bank transfers work?

Deposit accounts face similar pressure. Banks globally derive roughly 30% of retail profit from net interest income (McKinsey, 2025). That works because consumers don't obsess over interest rates. AI agents will obsess. They'll automatically move money to highest-yield accounts, updated daily.

New winners emerge. Digital wallet platforms positioned as "AI agent conduits" gain advantages. Payment orchestration platforms controlling routing decisions capture value. The platform question remains open: Who will "own the agent"? AI companies? Banks? Payment providers? E-commerce platforms?

Platform lock-in might simply replace card scheme dominance with AI platform dominance.

Trust, Fraud, and the Human Override

Consumers aren't ready for this. Research from Javelin Strategy & Research shows 88% worry AI will facilitate identity fraud (Visa, 2025). And only 36% trust their financial institution's current use of AI.

The concerns aren't paranoia. AI-driven fraud already accounts for over 50% of financial fraud in 2025 (Keyrus, 2025). Synthetic identity fraud, powered by generative AI, creates fake identities at scale. Combined with deepfakes bypassing biometric verification, 40% of financial institutions report increased GenAI-related attacks (Datos Insights via Visa, 2025). UK banks lost £571 million to fraud in the first half of 2024 alone (UK Finance via Keyrus, 2025).

Essential safeguards must include strict spending controls: dollar limits, merchant restrictions, time-based permissions, real-time approval prompts for unusual purchases.

Transparency mechanisms will become critical. Complete audit trails showing what AI agents purchased and why. User dashboards providing instant visibility. Clear revocation capabilities allowing instant cancellation of agent permissions.

Human oversight means fallback to human review for abnormal patterns. Natural language explanations when you question transactions. Simple override mechanisms requiring no technical knowledge.

Visa tokenises payment credentials locked by default. Each token requires explicit activation for specific purchase types (Visa Navigate, 2025). Google's AP2 protocol uses cryptographically signed mandates creating "tamper-proof chains" linking your intent, the agent's action, and the transaction outcome.

The challenge isn't just building compliant agents. It's ensuring the entire trust lifecycle remains crystal clear to users who reasonably worry about invisible systems spending their money.

What Finance Professionals Should Do Now

The strategic window is closing. India's pilot launched this morning. Mastercard and Visa announced frameworks in April. Google's protocol is live. You're already late.

Banks and payment providers: Participate in pilot programmes. Partner with AI platforms to influence protocol development rather than accepting standards defined by tech companies. Invest in API infrastructure supporting agent interactions. Build consent frameworks now, before regulation mandates approaches that don't fit your systems.

Fintechs: Focus on orchestration layers. Develop agent-friendly APIs. Position as the "agent payment provider" partner for institutions lacking capability. Build differentiation through transparency and trust mechanisms.

Merchants: Understand agent discovery differs from SEO. You're optimising for AI systems evaluating structured data, not humans typing queries. Prepare for agent-to-agent negotiations where value proposition matters more than brand. Build trust signals AI can evaluate: clear policies, verified credentials, transparent pricing.

Regulators: Clarify liability frameworks urgently. Adapt Strong Customer Authentication for autonomous systems without killing innovation. Ensure consumer protection extends to agent actions. Create sandboxes for controlled experimentation.

Those waiting for regulatory clarity may find themselves disrupted by those helping shape it. As David Birch observes, Google's AP2 protocol "will reshape the very nature of e-commerce" (Lexology, 2025). The question is who controls that reshaped landscape.

At Contentifai, we translate complex fintech innovation into narratives that resonate with sophisticated audiences. We articulate not just what you're building, but why it matters, whether you're a payment provider preparing for the agentic future or a fintech building the infrastructure. Our human+AI content approach bridges technical capability and human impact, just as agentic payments must bridge autonomous intelligence and human trust.

The Human Question

Return to that coffee scenario. Your AI ordered it, paid for it, sorted everything before you consciously registered you'd need caffeine.

The India pilot proves AI agents can handle payments. Technology will improve. Regulations will adapt. But what happens to consumer behaviour, brand loyalty, and financial relationships when commerce's interface is no longer human?

Visa's Jack Forestell suggests AI will "transform shopping and buying" as profoundly as e-commerce transformed physical retail (Visa, 2025). That transformation means a power shift: who controls the transaction moment, who captures the data, who owns the customer relationship.

For decades, banks owned customer relationships through current accounts. Card networks inserted themselves into every transaction. Digital wallets created new intermediaries. Now AI agents threaten to become the ultimate intermediary, sitting between consumers and everyone else.

For Europe's finance professionals, the choice is stark: help build the guardrails for this future, or watch others build them for you.

India's experiment launched this morning. How long before Europe follows?