Virtual cards, agentic tokens, and everything else that has to be true before AI assistants can be trusted to pay.
A foundation for the agentic payments economy
AI assistants are already running errands, booking travel, and managing subscriptions, and almost every one of those tasks ends in a payment. This white paper by PayOS examines the two instruments being used to make those payments, the agentic token and the virtual card, and explains why PayOS believes the agentic token, a tokenized form of the consumer's own card, is the right foundation for agentic payments. It also raises a set of questions about the virtual card model as it is used for agentic commerce today, offered for issuers, merchants, agent builders and wallet operators to examine and reach their own conclusions.
Inside you'll find:
✓Why every AI-assistant errand ends in a payment, and what the card rules require when the buyer is software
✓The agentic token versus the virtual card: one transaction versus back-to-back transactions
✓What the networks mean by back-to-back transactions, and the compliance questions facing staged digital wallet operators
✓The issuer's and the merchant's point of view
✓Where agentic payments can go from here
Aparna Krishnan Girish and Johnathan McGowan
PayOS