The next generation of payments is not in the payment layer.

Author: IreneDu

This is the 2.5th installment in the Stripe AI Strategy Breakdown series.

The origin of this series is because on April 30th, Stripe Sessions 2026 announced 288 products, and I observed that Stripe is trying to become the foundational infrastructure of the AI agent era.

The first article, “Stripe is not a payment company,” attempts to answer “Why Stripe”—its DNA determines that it can do this.

The second article, “KYC is dead, the agent economy is rewriting the underlying of financial regulation,” I want to dissect the future Stripe is betting on—the shape of the agent economy and why traditional payment infrastructure will become completely ineffective in front of it.

But during the second article, I received a comment from a peer:

I completely agree with the first half. AB 316 or any sovereignty law, in the short term, will not recognize “Agent as a legal entity”—the ultimate defendant is always a specific person. Know Your Agent cannot and will not change this.

But I reserve my opinion on the second half—“the only change is payment and clearing efficiency.” The problem with this statement isn’t the conclusion, but the framework it assumes: it treats KYA as an upgrade to existing payment systems.

This is what I believe warrants a dedicated discussion.

Let’s first recall the muscle memory of a former payments practitioner:

Payment forms are driven by scenarios, not designed from within the payment system itself.

Every true leap in payment—online banking, mobile wallets, QR code payments—was not because someone made a better product at the payment layer, but because a new transaction scenario emerged that shattered the underlying assumptions of the original payment system.

New payment forms “grow out” of the infrastructure demanded by that scenario, not “optimized” into it.

I once worked on payment innovation at Ant Group. In a platform that once pioneered “Quick Pay,” “Mobile Payment,” and “Scan-to-Pay,” the greatest joy and pain was pondering: what is the next-generation payment form?

We developed watch payments (and heartbeat verification as a substitute for face scan), NFC payments (“tap and pay” technology), participated in and authored many “next-gen” payment protocols, and even tried to get leadership to support exploration of metaverse payments.

Most of these projects didn’t come to fruition.

Looking back, the reason is the same: we tried to define new payments at the payment layer, but the driving scenarios for payment transformation hadn’t arrived—without the scenario, the infrastructure needed can’t grow, and no clever design at the payment layer can catch up.

The agent economy is that long-awaited new scenario.

KYA is the infrastructure layer emerging within it.

KYA is not a product at the payment layer; it is the foundational infrastructure of the agent economy.

In the five layers of KYA I defined in the previous article—Agent identity, authorization scope, intent signature, responsibility chain audit, credit rating—only authorization scope and responsibility chain audit are on the payment chain; the other three layers (identity, intent, credit) are not part of payments at all.

• The identity layer serves all scenarios requiring agent recognition: cross-platform calls, regulatory filings, internal corporate audits—payment is just one of them.
• The intent layer addresses the larger issue of AI alignment—payment is just one of many verification scenarios.
• The credit layer serves any system that needs to assign permissions and limits to agents—payment is simply one of its users.

Therefore, the peer’s judgment that “the only change is payment and clearing efficiency” translates into infrastructure language as: KYA is a subsystem of payments.

My judgment is the opposite: payments are a subsystem of KYA.

This inversion is the core discussion point of this article.

Stripe’s industry-leading investments happen to serve as empirical evidence.

Patrick Collison, at Sessions 2026, didn’t use the term “AI payments,” but rather “economic infrastructure for AI.” This isn’t marketing language; it’s a positioning choice. It indicates Stripe does not intend to confine itself to being a “payment company” but is betting on building the foundation for the agent economy.

Specifically, in product layout:

Stripe and OpenAI co-develop the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which is now used by Microsoft Copilot, Meta, and Google Gemini (which joined in April this year)—it’s fundamentally an identity and session protocol, not a payment protocol.

Shared Payment Token separates the agent from real card numbers, handling authorization, not settlement.

Stripe’s acquisitions—Bridge for stablecoin infrastructure, Privy for embedded wallets, and building Tempo blockchain for settlement—are all part of a layout that doesn’t fit into the “payment efficiency optimization” framework.

This portfolio only makes sense under the judgment that “KYA is an infrastructure layer.” If the agent economy were just about payment efficiency, Stripe wouldn’t need to develop stablecoins, embedded wallets, or build its own L1. What they are doing is occupying each layer of the five-layer KYA.

Stripe’s data head, Emily Glassberg Sands, in an interview with Every in April, provided several figures that further confirm the same point: a major AI client intercepts 250k fraudulent free trials weekly; she’s seen an AI company where each free trial consumes $25 worth of compute, with a 4% conversion rate—meaning each paid user initially costs $625; and in the past six months, free trial abuse has increased fourfold.

These numbers collectively show one thing: in the AI economy, the real decision of whether a transaction will succeed or be worth doing no longer happens at checkout—it occurs upstream in questions like “who is this, what do they want to do, is it worth allocating resources.” That’s why Stripe moved fraud detection Radar from “the moment of transaction” to “the entire user lifecycle”: it’s not about making traditional fraud detection faster, but about shifting the focus from “Is this payment problematic?” to “Is the behavior of this user/agent problematic throughout?” The former is a payment layer issue; the latter belongs to the KYA layer.

Returning to the peer’s question: who ultimately bears responsibility?

They’re right—the ultimate legal entity is still a person. AB 316 has already codified this at the legal level.

But that’s precisely the real problem KYA needs to solve: when the responsibility chain becomes distributed, identifying “which specific part of which person” is responsible is something that the KYC era didn’t need to do but the KYA era must do.

In the KYC era, responsibility chains are linear (user → payment/bank → merchant); if a transaction goes wrong, you intuitively know whom to blame.

In the KYA era, responsibility chains are networked (user → agent platform → model provider → payment protocol → bank → merchant, possibly calling other agents in between); even if the law says “blame the person, not the agent,” you still don’t know whom to blame—because responsibility is distributed across 5–7 entities.

KYA cannot change the legal ultimate attribution. But it can, within the mesh of the chain, use cryptography to solidify each entity’s role and actions—who authorized what, who executed what, who settled what, who fulfilled what. Turning “lack of evidence” into “evidence can be found”; transforming “which link is problematic and unverifiable” into “verifiable.”

This is not about improving payment efficiency.

It’s the first time responsibility traceability can occur within an agent network.

Therefore, I believe the statement “the only change is payment and clearing efficiency” is a misinterpretation—confusing infrastructure with functions.

What is truly happening is:

• Because a new class of economic actors (agents) has emerged, a new infrastructure layer (KYA) is forced to grow;
• This infrastructure redefines “who is on the other side, what they can do, who to blame if something goes wrong”; on top of this infrastructure, payment will reorganize itself into a form we cannot fully see today.

What will the next-generation payment form look like? Still unclear, but Stripe’s attempt to define this new species.

But in a world of uncertainty, one thing I am sure of—this will not be designed at the payment layer.

It will emerge from the scene after the foundational infrastructure (KYA) is laid out.