The Payments Blog

Everyone is talking about AI agents. They are searching, comparing, negotiating and making purchases on behalf of people and businesses. Payment companies are launching new agentic commerce protocols, banks are exploring programmable money, and technology providers are rebuilding checkout for a world where the buyer may not be human. But the agent is not where the most important battle will be won. The agent is the frontman. The machine wallet is the bank vault. Whoever contr

The days of manually scrolling through websites, comparing prices, and filling out checkout forms are numbered. In 2026, we’ve moved past the era of "AI-assisted" shopping and entered the age of Agentic Commerce. If you haven’t heard the term yet, you soon will. Agentic Commerce refers to a world where AI agents: software entities with the authority to make decisions: don’t just recommend products; they buy them for us. According to Accenture, these agents are projected to ha

If you still think Stripe is just that sleek little checkout box on a website, it’s time for a bit of a rethink. As we move through 2026, the payments giant has executed a massive strategic pivot. It’s no longer just about helping humans buy shoes or subscribe to SaaS; it’s about becoming the underlying financial operating system for the "Agentic Era". We’re talking about a world where AI agents: not humans: are doing the browsing, the negotiating, the buying, and the billing

It’s a Tuesday morning in 2027. You aren’t looking for a flight to Tokyo; your AI agent is. It has already negotiated a corporate rate with the airline, booked a carbon-neutral hotel that fits your "minimalist-chic" preference, and settled the bill for a local eSIM. The kicker? You didn’t press a single button. You didn’t even see a checkout screen. As AI continues to eat the payment world, the very definition of a "wallet" is changing. We’re moving away from plastic cards in

If you’ve been following the RivaTech blog for a while, you know we’ve been banging on about the "Agent Economy" for months. We’ve talked about how AI is moving from a fancy autocomplete tool to something that actually does things. Well, as of May 2026, the game has officially changed. Up until now, AI agents have been essentially broke. They could research your holiday, draft your emails, and maybe even write a bit of code, but the second they needed to actually buy somethin

We’ve been hearing about the "AI revolution" for a few years now. Most of us use it to summarise long emails, write a bit of code, or perhaps generate a funny image of a cat riding a surfboard. But while we were all busy chatting with bots, something much more fundamental began to shift under the hood of the global economy. The dream of AI doing our chores: booking the flights, sorting the groceries, managing the admin: is old news. What’s actually new is that AI is starting

Google just dropped something massive in the payments world. Their new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), announced in September 2025, is...

The payments industry is witnessing a seismic shift, and it's happening faster than most people realise. Both Visa and Mastercard have...