What did EMVCo release on 1 September 2026?

EMVCo released a draft document, EMV Agentic Payments - Framework for Specifications v1.0, for public comment. It is a framework rather than a finished specification: it sets out how EMVCo believes global card specifications could be developed to support secure, interoperable and scalable card-based agentic payments. The public comment period closes on 30 September 2026 and all interested stakeholders are invited to respond.

Why is a separate intent layer needed if the card credential is already valid?

A valid payment credential establishes that an AI agent is able to pay. It does not by itself establish whether a specific purchase falls within what the customer permitted. If a customer authorises an agent to spend up to a set amount per month, each individual transaction can carry a valid credential while a later one exceeds the mandate. Intent data is intended to give participants a common reference point for whether that permission existed and remained active.

Does this affect disputes and chargebacks?

It could. A card dispute today generally turns on whether the cardholder authorised the transaction. A dispute over an agent-initiated purchase may require a more detailed record: what the customer instructed the agent to do, how long that authority lasted, and whether the purchase stayed within its limits. Under the proposed approach, intent becomes part of the transaction record rather than something reconstructed after the fact.

Is EMVCo's framework binding on merchants or issuers?

No. This is a technical consultation, not a law or a regulatory requirement, and no participant is required to adopt Intent Services. EMVCo's specifications nonetheless underpin core parts of global card infrastructure, so the direction it sets carries weight for issuers, acquirers, merchants and their vendors.

What else might EMVCo work on for agentic payments?

EMVCo has said later work may include Know Your Agent capabilities and Agentic Transaction Indicators. Those would identify the AI agent involved in a transaction, communicate relevant information about it, and signal to payment participants that an AI system acted on the consumer's behalf. The framework could also inform future changes to EMV 3-D Secure, EMV Payment Tokenisation, EMV Secure Remote Commerce and digital payment credentials.

EMVCo Proposes an Intent Layer for Card-Based Agentic Payments

Q: What are Intent Services?

Intent Services is the shared layer proposed in the draft framework. According to the draft, it would let authorised payment participants register, reference, retrieve and manage consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a transaction. The framework concentrates on cases where intent has to persist across more than one interaction, such as recurring purchases, cumulative spending limits and post-transaction activity.

On 1 September 2026 EMVCo released a draft framework for card-based agentic payments and opened it for public comment until 30 September. The draft proposes a shared layer called Intent Services, which would let authorised payment participants register, reference, retrieve and manage consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a transaction. It is the card system’s own answer to a question the existing rails were not built to settle: not whether an AI agent can pay, but whether this particular purchase is one the customer actually allowed.

Editor’s note: the account of the framework here was verified on 7 September 2026 against EMVCo’s own EMV Insights post of 1 September, written by the chair of its Agentic Payments Task Force, which is linked in the sources. The draft document itself sits behind EMVCo’s resources page and has not been read in full, so treat the summary of its contents as EMVCo’s own description rather than a reading of the specification. The comment period closes 30 September 2026. Nothing here is legal advice.

Who EMVCo is, and why a draft from it matters

EMVCo is the technical body that creates and manages the EMV Specifications behind card-based payments worldwide. It is collectively owned by six payment networks: American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa. Its specifications cover EMV contact and contactless chip, EMV 3-D Secure, EMV Payment Tokenisation, EMV Secure Remote Commerce and EMV QR Codes.

This is not a vendor protocol competing for adoption in the way ACP, UCP, AP2 and x402 are. EMVCo does not launch products or sign partners. It writes the specifications that issuers, acquirers, networks and terminal vendors build against. A framework document from EMVCo is an early signal about where the card system as a whole expects agentic payment controls to sit.

EMVCo first said publicly that it was working on this in November 2025, when it announced it was examining how EMV 3-D Secure, EMV Payment Tokenisation and EMV Secure Remote Commerce could be developed to support card-based agentic payments. The September 2026 draft is the first concrete output of that work.

The problem the framework addresses

Existing card infrastructure has well-developed tools for three things: authenticating the consumer, protecting the credential, and authorising an individual transaction. Agentic commerce introduces a fourth question that none of them answers.

A payment credential presented by an AI agent can be entirely valid while the purchase it is being used for sits outside what the consumer permitted. The example used in trade coverage of the draft is a consumer who authorises an agent to spend up to a set amount per month on groceries. Each individual purchase may carry a valid credential and involve a merchant that has done nothing wrong, and yet a later purchase in the sequence can breach the cumulative limit. Nothing in the authorisation message tells the issuer that.

The gap is specifically about permission that persists over time. A single transaction can be authorised in the moment. A standing mandate has a status and a lifecycle: it can be created, drawn down, amended, exhausted or revoked, and the parties to a transaction currently have no shared way to see where it stands.

What Intent Services would do

The draft proposes Intent Services as a shared, interoperable layer that authorised payment participants could use to register, reference, retrieve and manage consumer-authorised intent across the life of a mandate, not just at the moment of authorisation. The framework concentrates on the persistent cases: recurring purchases, cumulative spending limits and post-transaction activity.

Read alongside the controls that already exist, the emerging shape is a stack of four distinct checks rather than one:

Layer	Question it answers	Status today
Credential authentication	Is this a valid payment credential?	Established (tokenisation, 3-D Secure)
Agent identity	Which AI system initiated this payment?	Emerging (Know Your Agent work across the industry)
Persistent intent	What did the consumer permit, and is that permission still live?	Proposed here as Intent Services
Transaction authorisation	Should this specific transaction be approved?	Established

EMVCo has said later work may include Know Your Agent capabilities and Agentic Transaction Indicators, which would identify the agent involved, carry relevant information about it, and flag to payment participants that an AI system acted on the consumer’s behalf. The framework could in turn inform future revisions to EMV 3-D Secure, EMV Payment Tokenisation, EMV Secure Remote Commerce and digital payment credentials.

The dispute and chargeback implication

The most immediately commercial consequence is in disputes. A card dispute today largely resolves around whether the cardholder authorised the transaction. Where an agent initiated the purchase, that framing is incomplete. Resolving the dispute may require a record of what the consumer instructed the agent to do, how long that authority ran, and whether the purchase remained inside its limits.

If intent becomes part of the transaction record, disputes over agent-initiated purchases become answerable from data rather than from reconstruction after the event. That is a meaningful change for issuers and merchants, and it points at a practical readiness question: most organisations accepting cards today hold no such record, and would have no way to answer an intent question if one arrived attached to a chargeback.

What this is not

This is a consultation on a draft framework. It is not a rule, not a regulation and not a finished specification. No participant is required to adopt Intent Services, and the framework may change materially in response to feedback. EMVCo has invited all interested stakeholders to comment by 30 September 2026.

It is also worth being precise about scope. The framework addresses card-based agentic payments. It does not speak to stablecoin or account-to-account rails, where agent payment activity is developing under different protocols and different governance.

What to do about it

For merchants, issuers and acquirers, three steps follow from the draft while the comment period is open.

Read the draft and consider responding, particularly if agent-initiated orders are already reaching your checkout. The comment period closes on 30 September 2026 and the framework is at the stage where industry input still shapes it.

Work out who in your organisation would answer an intent question during a chargeback. If the answer is nobody, that is the gap the framework is describing.

Watch the Know Your Agent and Agentic Transaction Indicator workstreams. Those are the pieces that would tell a merchant that an agent, rather than a person, was on the other side of a transaction, and they are the ones most likely to arrive as concrete specification changes.