Stripe adds agentic AI tech; Google debuts card in India | PaymentsSource

With Visa and Mastercard attempting to bring agentic commerce to a wider audience, Stripe is adding its own set of tools.

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Stripe has launched Agentic Commerce Suite, which lets businesses sell through AI agents. Retailers at launch include Coach, Kate Space, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters and Ashley Furniture. ACS’ e-commerce clients at launch include Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce and Etsy. 

The San Francisco and Dublin-based Stripe hopes to capitalize on the buzz surrounding new forms of artificial intelligence. Forty-five percent of consumers report having used generative AI, according to BCG, which also reports 81% of consumers expect to use agentic AI.

Stripe’s ACS follows the payment company’s release of an agentic commerce protocol, a standard for agentic commerce that’s designed to make it easier for AI agents to communicate. Stripe will also manage shared payment tokens, which allow AI agents to pass a buyer’s payment credentials to businesses to process payments. “Token” in this case refers to replacing payment details with substitute numbers to mitigate theft.

Stripe is entering a crowded and growing market. Existing agentic commerce products include Mastercard Agent Pay, which generates personalized payment experiences to consumers, merchants and issuers. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce enables AI agents to navigate merchants and make payments. PayPal has also made agentic AI a major part of its strategy. —John Adams 

Google rolls out UPI-linked credit card

Google is stepping up its game in India with a new co-branded, UPI-linked credit card. 

Google Pay Flex Axis Bank Credit Card is a virtual credit card that runs on the RuPay network, the country’s card network that competes with Visa and Mastercard. Customers apply directly in the Google Pay app, earn cash-back rewards on daily spend and can split their bill into monthly installments. 

Google said in a blog post that it plans on rolling out the card with additional issuers in the future. 

“We are incredibly excited about the potential here to transform how users engage with credit and empower millions to confidently manage their daily finances,” the company said. 

India’s Unified Payment Interface, or UPI, has been growing around 32% year over year, according to India’s Press Information Bureau. In June 2025 alone, it processed over ₹24.03 lakh crore ($288 billion) in payments across 18.4 billion transactions. By comparison, there were about 13.9 billion transactions processed in the same period in 2024. 

The UPI system has 491 million consumers on its network and 65 million merchants. It also connects 675 banks to the platform.  —Joey Pizzolato

UK regulators lend weight to ‘pay by bank’ for subscriptions

The Financial Conduct Authority will support a consortium that will streamline repeating payments, such as utilities or other bills, with a dedicated company set to launch before the end of the year.

A group of 31 fintechs, banks and payment companies earlier this year agreed to make an initial investment in a company that will enable customers to authorize registered payment providers to initiate transactions between bank accounts. 

Participants include Barclays, GoCardless, Mastercard, Monzo, Plaid, Revolut, TrueLayer and Wise, among others. The FCA will supervise the protocol that will standardize the payments among the participants. 

“Like other European countries that have adopted A2A payment methods as standard, Pay by Bank in the U.K. powered by open banking is now moving quickly toward commercial adoption at scale. VRP is the essential next step,” TrueLayer COO Rob Kerrigan, who will be on the new company’s board, said in a release. 

Pay by bank schemes, or account-to-account payments, move funds directly between bank accounts, and are an alternative to credit cards. A2A is an older method but it’s gained steam as a way to undercut card feels, popular enough that Visa and Mastercard have both become active in the market. A2A consumer spending at merchants grew 13% to $834 billion in 2024, according to Datos Insights. —John Adams 

Mastercard ups its own A2A bet

Mastercard has partnered with payments firm Interchecks to combine Mastercard’s open finance technology with Intercheck’s pay-by-bank product. Interchecks says the partnership will enable it to diversify beyond its roots as a gaming payment company. 

Pay by Bank uses the consumer’s existing bank authentication to access the information to execute payments. The data is also designed to reduce the risk of transaction fees for insufficient balances by timing the payments based on the consumer’s balance and due date.

A2A payments are a rival product to credit cards, though Mastercard and Visa have warmed to the concept as a way to boost relationships with merchants. The card networks have also diversified their products beyond point of sale transactions in recent years as regulatory and economic pressure on interchange fees has increased. —John Adams 

Standard Chartered, Ant accelerate tokenized treasury management

Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong says it has tokenized Chinese yuan and U.S. dollar accounts on Ant International’s blockchain treasury management, following the addition of Hong Kong dollars in 2024.

SCBHK, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered, developed the technology in partnership with Ant International, with initial use cases including B2B payments. The two firms are operating under a Hong Kong incubator for distributed ledger technology. Standard Chartered has been broadly bullish on cryptocurrency technology, with CEO Bill Winters recently saying “all transactions” will soon be processed on a blockchain. 

“As corporates and institutions increasingly rely on ‘just in time’ liquidity, demand for real time and 24/7 treasury management is rapidly accelerating,” Mahesh Kini, global head of cash management at Standard Chartered, said in a release. —–John Adams  

Pix Automático gains momentum six months after launch

Brazil’s recurring payment feature Pix Automático has seen a surge in popularity in the six months following its launch, Ebanx said. The Brazilian fintech sells payment processing, fraud prevention and cross-border payment services. 

The number of subscriptions using Pix Automático has tripled month over month since its launch in June, and payment volume has nearly quadrupled at Ebanx merchants, Ebanx said. 

“We have already integrated and are operating Pix Automático for dozens of global companies across streaming, SaaS, financial services, and online education,” said João Del Valle, the CEO and co-founder of Ebanx in a statement. “Our Pix infrastructure has been rigorously tested since the system first launched in 2020.”

Ebanx is anticipating that Automático subscriptions will grow 34% on a month-over-month basis through the first year, and that volume will grow 41% in the same period. 

Pix Automático launched in June and unlocked recurring and subscription payments on the country’s real-time payment network, Pix, that previously was only accessible to consumers with a credit card. Pix also said it plans on launching an installment lending service, similar to buy now/pay later, by the end of the year. —Joey Pizzolato

Revolut enters the mobile phone market in the UK

Revolut is venturing into the mobile phone market with a new unlimited 5G plan for customers in the United Kingdom. 

Revolut Mobile costs £12.50 ($16.72) per month for customers who enroll by March 30, 2026, and £14.99 ($20.06) afterward, and includes unlimited 5G data, calls, text and 20 gigabytes of roaming data in the European Union and United States. Customers can have up to three different phone numbers on a single plan, and can manage their plan directly in Revolut’s mobile app. 

Revolut has 12 million customers in the U.K. 

“Revolut Mobile is more than just another mobile service, it’s a truly differentiated alternative designed to change the industry,” Revolut General Manager Telco Hadi Nasrallah said in a statement. “Our goal is simple: offer the best service, at the best price, leveraging the best user experience. We’re bringing true innovation with features such as multiple numbers and global messaging, while removing any hassle or hidden fees from the process.”

The service is powered by Gigs, a telecom-as-a-service company that also powers mobile phone services from Klarna, NuBank and Walmart-backed OnePay. 

Fintechs – especially those with super app aspirations – are increasingly turning to phone plans as a key customer acquisition tool. It also is a way to increase customer stickiness, lifetime value and daily customer engagement within the app. —Joey Pizzolato

DTCC partners with Digital Asset to tokenize US Treasuries on the Canton Network

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation is teaming up with Digital Asset Holdings and the Canton Network to enable a subset of U.S. Treasury securities held under custody at DTC to be minted on the Canton Network. 

The announcement came after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cleared the way for DTCC to begin offering tokenization services. 

The companies are working toward a minimum viable product in a “controlled production environment” during the first half of 2026, and plan on scaling the size and scope of the program in the months that follow. 

“DTCC’s partnership with Digital Asset and the Canton Network is a strategic step forward as we collaborate across the industry to build a digital infrastructure that seamlessly bridges the traditional and digital financial ecosystems and provides unmatched scalability and safety,” said Frank La Salla, CEO of DTCC, in a statement. “This collaboration creates a roadmap to bring real-world, high-value tokenization use cases to market, starting with U.S. Treasury securities and eventually expanding to a broad spectrum of DTC-eligible assets across network providers.” —Joey Pizzolato