News

EPAA Launches AI Agent Payment Working Group in Asia Pacific, HSBC Joins as Founding Member

The Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) has established an AI and Agent Payment Working Group, with HSBC as a founding member, to tackle standards for agent identity, authentication, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and liability.

ACI Executive Proposes 'Digital Medina' Vision: AI Shopping Could Turn Every Transaction into a Micro-Tender

Philip Bruno, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at ACI Worldwide, envisions a future where buyer AI agents send requirements—budget, delivery, returns, and warranties—to multiple merchants, receive machine-readable composite offers, and automatically compare them, turning an ordinary purchase into a real-time 'micro-RFP.'

Agent Commerce Accelerates, Reshaping the Competitive Logic of the Payments Industry

Research from Accenture, Visa, and Mastercard shows AI agents are moving beyond product search and recommendations into price comparison, payment method selection, and transaction initiation, making 'agent commerce' a new competitive variable in payments.

Halborn Unveils A2A Payment Threat Model: On-Chain Irreversibility Amplifies Security Risks

Blockchain security firm Halborn has released an Agent-to-Agent payment threat model, highlighting risks such as prompt injection, identity spoofing, wallet key leaks, malicious service providers, smart contract vulnerabilities, oracle manipulation, and cascading payments when AI agents autonomously transact using stablecoins and smart contract wallets.

Natural Raises $30M Series A to Build AI Agent Payment Infrastructure

The company, co-founded by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, is building a full-stack payment platform for AI agents, with six products already in production.

Attack Lab #5: We Paid One Authorization Twice — and Pushed the Audit Fingerprint Beyond Our Own Reach

Two breaks at once. One: with no single-use nonce, a fully-valid payment could be replayed until the budget drained — we added an anti-replay gate (replay → 409). Two: Episode 4's hash chain lived only in our own DB, so an admin rewriting the whole tail couldn't be disproven — we exposed the tip publicly (/api/audit-anchor) and had GitHub witness it on a schedule. Honest limit: true non-repudiation still needs anchoring to a public chain.

Hyundai Card Completes Stablecoin Cross-Border Remittance Pilot, $20,000 Settled in ~7 Minutes

Hyundai Card and Hyundai Motor have completed a proof-of-concept for stablecoin-based cross-border remittance, transferring $20,000 in USDT from the U.S. to Mexico in about seven minutes.

AI Agents Accelerate into Full-Chain Cross-Border Payments, Driving Autonomous Process Orchestration

IMF and payments industry research indicates that AI agents are gradually being applied to authorization verification, compliance screening, payment routing, FX management, settlement tracking, and automated reconciliation in cross-border payments, potentially integrating previously fragmented manual processes into end-to-end intelligent orchestration.

Japan Logistics Giant Plans to Settle Fees for ~2,300 Transport Partners Using JPYC

AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings aims to use the yen-pegged stablecoin JPYC to pay transport commissions to approximately 2,300 partner firms and some individual drivers, shortening settlement times, cutting transfer costs, and increasing payment frequency.

OKX Europe Launches One-Way USDT-to-USDC Conversion Channel

OKX Europe now allows eligible EEA users to deposit USDT and convert it one-way to MiCA-compliant USDC. As Tether has not yet obtained the EU authorization required under the MiCA framework for USDT, the stablecoin cannot be traded or used for other transactions on the OKX Europe platform.

Stripe and Swift Double Down on Next-Gen Payment Infrastructure, Competitive Boundaries Increasingly Blur

GENIUS Act Rulemaking Deadline Passes, U.S. Regulatory Framework Still Unfinalized

As of July 18, 2026, U.S. regulators have yet to finalize most of the payment stablecoin rules required under the GENIUS Act.