Payment industry: How will AI agents use credit cards? Impact of agentic commerce on payment businesses

Research evidence excerpt

Payment industry: How will AI agents use credit cards? Impact of agentic commerce on payment businesses

Global Markets Research

29 July 2026Payment industry

EQUITY: JAPAN INSURANCE & DIVERSIFIED FINANCIALS

How will AI agents use credit cards? Research Analysts Japan insurance & diversified

Impact of agentic commerce on payment businesses financials

Futoshi Sasaki - NSC

Expecting adoption to gather pace in Japan too in 2027, near-term focus on PSPs futoshi.sasaki@nomura.com

responsible for building APIs, card payments might be replaced over longer term +81 3 6703 1053

On 23 July, as part of our speaker series, we invited Masayuki Yamamoto from Cholchi Kwak - NSC

Yamamoto International Consultants to discuss the adoption in Japan of agentic cholchi.kwak@nomura.com

commerce (AC) and agentic payments (APs) used in AC. +81 3 6703 1175

We expect adoption to gather pace in 2027, which will in turn expand the role of payment

service providers (PSPs) that build application programming interfaces (APIs). Looking

further ahead, we identify risks such as a shift from card payments to other payment

methods, and some payment operators being bypassed completely. The main takeaways

were as follows.

What are AC and APs? In e-commerce, systems in which AI agents understand user

preferences and aid product searches and comparisons are known as AI commerce, while

systems where AI agents are involved up to the payment stage are known as agentic

commerce (AC). Payments used in AC are called agentic payments (APs).

Credit card payments likely to remain central in near term: Existing payment methods

such as credit cards will likely be used in AC for now. In order to prevent fraudulent use

and overuse by AI agents, payments will be made by tokenizing card data and adding