The news: Klarna and Affirm deepened their partnerships with Stripe and will support Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), per press releases.

These tokens give Klarna and Affirm better visibility to AI agents shopping on behalf of consumers. 

How we got here: Klarna and Affirm have been bullish on agentic commerce. 

• Klarna adopted Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and created its own standard, Agent Product Protocol, which makes products discoverable and understandable by AI agents. 
• Affirm, meanwhile, supports Google’s Agent-to-Agent (AP2) protocol and UCP. 

With protocols representing the new toll roads of agentic payments, neither party wants to miss out on the early windfall of the seeming next era of payments.

Why this matters: AI agents can only select a payment option if it’s programmed in their language and fits the parameters of their users’ permissioned prompt. 

Adopting Shared Payment Tokens makes it easier for AI agents to surface Klarna’s and Affirm’s BNPL products for approval from consumers instead of overlooking their payment platform for a more agent-friendly choice, unlike AI-embedded digital wallets and virtual cards explicitly designed for agentic commerce.

Implications for payment providers: Partnerships and integrations with key agentic platforms give payment providers a chance to catch early agent-driven volume, which also increases their attractiveness to merchants looking for easy agentic visibility. 

Payment providers’ position in the ecommerce funnel is reversing from downstream to upstream: In traditional ecommerce, merchants lead consumers to payment providers; in agentic commerce, consumers find merchants through payment platforms. This unlocks new power for payment platforms to wield, like gating merchant visibility.