Payments for agentic commerce: 2026 Singapore guide

Key Takeaways:

• Agentic commerce (where AI agents shop, compare, and pay on behalf of consumers) is already live in Singapore, with DBS and UOB processing the first authenticated agent transactions through Mastercard Agent Pay in March 2026.

• Southeast Asia's real-time payment rails, including FAST/PayNow, DuitNow, PromptPay, and QRIS, give the region a head start in supporting instant, low-cost agent settlements that Western markets are still building toward.

• Airwallex Business Accounts let Singapore merchants collect and hold foreign revenue in native multi-currency wallets, so margins on agent-initiated cross-border transactions aren't eroded by forced conversion.

Payments for agentic commerce are already here. AI agents are completing real purchases in Singapore, and the payment infrastructure supporting them is evolving quickly.

For merchants, getting ready isn't just about accepting a new payment method. It means making sure your checkout, payment rails, and multi-currency infrastructure can support AI-initiated transactions just as smoothly as those made by human customers.

In this guide, we'll explain how payments for agentic commerce work, why Southeast Asia is well placed to support them, and what Singapore businesses can do today to prepare for the next wave of online commerce.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is when AI agents shop and buy on behalf of consumers. Instead of simply recommending products, they can compare options, make decisions, and complete purchases within rules the user has already approved.

From human checkout to AI buyer

Online shopping already has automation built in, from saved cards to subscription billing. What's different with agentic commerce is decision making, not just execution.

An agent compares prices, checks availability, and decides which option meets your goal, then completes the purchase on its own.

AI referred traffic is also converting better than traditional channels. By March 2026, AI sourced visits to US retail sites were converting 42% better than non AI traffic, a sharp reversal from a year earlier when the same traffic converted 38% worse.¹

Traffic from AI sources to US retail sites also grew 393% year on year in the first quarter of 2026.²

The scale of the shift

Bain & Company estimates the US agentic commerce market alone could reach US$300 billion to US$500 billion by 2030, making up 15% to 25% of total e-commerce sales there.³

APAC is not sitting on the sidelines: Deloitte projects the region will drive around two thirds of the world's new retail sales over the next five years, with industry forecasts suggesting up to 25% of global e-commerce sales could be agent influenced by 2030.⁴

Digital wallets, already dominant across Southeast Asia, are well placed to be the main payment method for agentic commerce in the region. That gives Singapore and the wider region a head start over markets where cards still lead.

That advantage only counts if your payment setup can actually use it. Airwallex supports 160+ local payment methods across the region, so you don't have to build a new connection every time you enter another market. Learn more about Airwallex Payments or sign up now.

Why SEA's payment infrastructure is built for agentic commerce

Southeast Asia already runs on instant settlement rails, while many Western markets are still building toward them.

Real-time payment rails across the region

SEA’s account-to-account rails provide low-cost, real-time payment infrastructure that can support many agentic payment use cases as they evolve.

• FAST/PayNow in Singapore: instant, 24/7, already processing agent transactions through DBS and UOB

• DuitNow in Malaysia: real time rail with ASEAN cross border connectivity to PayNow already live

• PromptPay in Thailand: national instant payment system with expanding QR based cross border settlement

• InstaPay and PESONet in the Philippines: the real time retail payments backbone

• QRIS in Indonesia: a unified QR standard interoperable with Singapore's NETS

• Napas in Vietnam: the national switch for real time domestic transfers

For merchants, these rails can enable instant domestic settlement and provide a strong foundation for future agent payment flows.

Digital wallet dominance creates an agent-ready consumer base

GrabPay, ShopeePay, GCash, Dana, and OVO are already part of daily purchasing behaviour across the region. Wallet stored credentials are easier to delegate to an agent than a card number, which lowers the barrier to AI shopping adoption.

Singapore consumers are also used to one tap, credential stored payments, so the shift to agent delegated payments is smaller here than in card first markets.

ASEAN payment connectivity initiatives

Cross border QR linkages, including Project Nexus and bilateral links between PayNow, DuitNow, and PromptPay, are building a regional payment mesh that agent infrastructure can run on.

Ant International has partnered with Google on the Agent Payments Protocol and with Visa on Visa Intelligent Commerce to build AI driven payments across Asia Pacific.⁵ In 2025, the region accounted for nearly a quarter of global agentic commerce revenue.⁶

This suggests future agent payment capabilities may increasingly be shaped around APAC payment behaviour and cross border standards, rather than added on later.

What's already live in Singapore

Agentic commerce in Singapore has moved past pilots into real transactions:

• In March 2026, Mastercard completed the first live authenticated agentic transaction in the country with DBS and UOB, an AI agent booking a ride to Changi Airport through hoppa.⁷

• Visa is running a parallel pilot with DBS covering food and beverage purchases, and has since expanded its Agentic Ready programme to more than 50 issuers across ten APAC markets.⁸

For the regulatory backdrop, the identity and authorisation protocols behind these deployments, and a full breakdown of which Singapore banks are live, see our guide to agentic commerce in Singapore.

For merchants, the practical point is this: agent initiated transactions are already hitting Singapore checkouts. 

If your payment setup isn't built to accept delegated tokens cleanly, including the right fraud rules and compliant endpoints, you risk higher decline rates on a traffic segment that's only going to grow.

How agent payments actually work

Once an agent is authorised to buy on someone's behalf, the payment itself follows a fairly standard sequence. Here’s how it works:

1. The consumer authorises an AI agent and sets boundaries: which merchants, how much, for how long.

2. The agent receives a scoped payment token rather than the actual card or bank credentials.

3. The token is passed to the merchant at checkout.

4. The payment processor handles it as a standard card not present transaction.

5. Funds settle through the underlying payment method used, such as card networks or supported domestic payment rails like PayNow.

Why tokens instead of card numbers

Tokens carry a few built in limits that keep a compromised token from causing much damage:

• Scoped to a single merchant and currency

• Capped at a set amount

• Set to expire quickly

It's the same principle behind Apple Pay and Google Pay, extended to buyers that aren't human. Raw card data never reaches the agent, and PCI DSS rules still apply to how that data is handled.

The protocols behind it

Two open standards currently shape how agents discover products and complete checkout:

• Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), built by OpenAI and Stripe, defines how an agent hands a scoped token to a merchant's checkout endpoint.⁹

• Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), backed by Google and Shopify, covers a broader span of the shopping journey, from discovery through post purchase.¹⁰

Shopify merchants can support both without managing the protocol layer directly, since Shopify abstracts the integration work.¹⁰

For most merchants, the practical task isn't choosing a side. It's making sure your checkout and product data are structured well enough for either protocol to work cleanly.

Where cross border payments cost you money

Most of the agent payments conversation focuses on authentication and checkout. The currency side gets less attention, but it's where merchants actually lose money.

When an AI agent buys something across borders, whoever processes that payment usually converts the funds right away, at their own exchange rate rather than the real market rate. That gap is where the cost hides.

There’s no standalone fee you see on an invoice, because it's baked into the FX rate. And because agents can transact more frequently than a person clicking through checkout once in a while, that small gap on each transaction adds up faster.

If you're a Singapore merchant collecting SGD, MYR, and USD from different buyers, the fix isn't complicated: hold each currency separately instead of converting everything back to SGD the moment it lands.

Airwallex makes this possible with:

• Global Accounts that let you hold funds in 20+ currencies

• Payments infrastructure that collects through 160+ local payment methods in 180+ countries, so you receive funds in the currency your customer pays in rather than your home currency

How to make your business ready for agent buyers

Agents are doing more of the discovery, comparing, and buying. Here’s how to ensure your business is ready for agent buyers:

Make your inventory visible to agents

Agents don't browse your storefront, they query structured data. If your catalogue isn't machine readable, you may be skipped entirely.

• Implement schema.org Product markup with complete attributes: price, availability, GTIN, description

• Some emerging agentic commerce frameworks propose publishing a capability file (such as /.well-known/agent-card.json) so compatible agents can discover your checkout capabilities.

For a deeper walkthrough, see our guide on making your products discoverable to AI shopping agents.

Check your checkout against agent requirements

• Accept delegated payment tokens, the mechanism used by Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and similar systems

• Remove friction built only for human verification, since some CAPTCHA setups and SMS OTP flows will block legitimate agents

• Review your fraud scoring rules, since agent transactions can trigger false positives if your rules were tuned for human behaviour

For businesses building agent-specific payment flows, Airwallex's Card Issuing supports virtual card issuance, while the Core API provides programmable payment infrastructure that developers can integrate into their applications.

Tag agent traffic separately in your analytics

Agent initiated transactions will start to distort your usual conversion metrics, like average session duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate. Tag agent traffic early so you can measure it accurately, instead of folding it into numbers it doesn't actually reflect.

How Airwallex helps you get ready to accept agentic commerce payments

Everything in this guide comes down to one question: can your payment stack actually handle a buyer that isn't a person?

That's the gap Airwallex is built to close. On the currency side, our Global Accounts and Payments let you hold and settle in the currency your customer actually paid in, so agent driven cross border sales don't cost you extra on every conversion.

On the checkout side, we've also built the Agentic Commerce Suite, which connects you to agents across the major protocols, lets you decide which agents can buy from you, and gives banks the information they need to approve an agent's purchase instead of declining it by mistake.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Are agentic payments already happening in Singapore?

Yes. Mastercard Agent Pay processed its first authenticated transaction in Singapore in March 2026 through DBS and UOB, and Visa has a live pilot with DBS covering food and beverage purchases. These are real transactions, not sandbox tests.

Do I need to do anything differently to accept agent payments?

If your product data is structured well and your checkout already supports modern tokenised payment flows, you'll be well positioned, although additional agent-specific capabilities may still be required. The main gaps to check are structured data quality on your product pages, fraud rules that might mistake agent traffic for bots, and whether your payment setup can handle delegated tokens cleanly.

How do I avoid losing money on FX when agents buy across currencies?

Use a multi-currency account that lets you settle in the same currency your customer paid in, rather than converting everything back to SGD automatically. Airwallex Global Accounts support this across 20+ currencies, so you only convert when you actually need to.

What real-time payment rails are available for agentic commerce in Southeast Asia?

The main ones are Singapore's FAST and PayNow, Malaysia's DuitNow, Thailand's PromptPay, Indonesia's QRIS, the Philippines' InstaPay and PESONet, and Vietnam's Napas. Their instant settlement makes them well suited to the kind of frequent, small transactions agentic commerce tends to generate.

Who is responsible if an AI agent makes a purchase by mistake?

This depends on how the transaction was authorised. If the consumer set up the agent with a spending limit and the transaction stayed within it, the usual card-not-present rules apply, and merchants are generally protected in the same way they would be for any other authenticated transaction. Mastercard and Visa have both started building agent-specific protections into their card programmes, but the space is still new, so check the specific terms of whichever protocol or network you're using.

Sources:

1. business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable

2. techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/ai-traffic-to-us-retailers-rose-393-in-q1-and-its-boosting-their-revenue-too

3. bain.com/insights/2030-forecast-how-agentic-ai-will-reshape-us-retail-snap-chart

4. deloitte.com/southeast-asia/en/about/press-room/asia-pacific-set-to-lead-the-agentic-future-of-commerce

5. fintechmagazine.com/news/ant-international-partners-google-on-agent-payments-protocol

6. fintechnews.sg/130498/ai/ant-international-agentic-commerce

7. theasianbanker.com/press-releases/mastercard-completes-first-live-authenticated-agentic-transaction-in-singapore-with-dbs-and-uob

8. visa.com.sg/about-visa/stories/2026/agentic-commerce-gets-real-in-asia-pacific-is-the-ecosystem-ready.html

9. openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt

10. askphill.com/blogs/blog/agentic-commerce-for-shopify-protocols-platforms-and-what-to-prioritize-in-2026

This publication does not constitute legal, tax, or professional advice from Airwallex, nor does it substitute seeking such advice, and makes no express or implied representations / warranties / guarantees regarding content accuracy, completeness, or currency. If you would like to request an update, feel free to contact us at [[email protected]]. Airwallex (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. (201626561Z) is licensed as a Major Payment Institution and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.