OnePay has recently announced its involvement in Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a move aimed at shaping the future of agentic payments.
This protocol, developed through collaboration among several payment and technology firms, emphasizes user authorization as a key aspect. It employs cryptographically signed ‘mandates’ to confirm user requests, ensuring that AI agents can act only with explicit permission. This approach establishes a clear, auditable trail for every transaction initiated by an agent.
Through its participation in AP2, OnePay is expected to contribute significantly to enhancing the security and transparency of agentic payments while making these transactions more beneficial for consumers, merchants, and developers alike.
Enhancing Payment Infrastructure
The official press release from OnePay highlights several areas where they aim to impact payment methods:
- User authorization with defined constraints such as spending limits, merchant rules, and reuse controls, ensuring greater user control over transactions.
- Secure credential reuse, enabling safe, permission-based access to various financial instruments like cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets.
- Inclusion of smarter financing options that provide agents with standardized, comparable financing choices, such as pay-in-4 or installments, with clear disclosures.
- Support for multi-instrument wallets, allowing AI agents to choose the most appropriate payment method seamlessly and securely.
All these features are designed to uphold user intent and control in agent-led commerce. The Agent Payments Protocol was introduced by Google in September 2025 as an extension of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP), aiming to establish a payment-agnostic framework for efficient transactions across diverse payment methods.
Google’s initiative involved over 60 organizations, including Adyen, American Express, Ant International, Coinbase, Etsy, Forter, Intuit, JCB, Mastercard, Mysten Labs, PayPal, Revolut, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UnionPay International, and Worldpay, among others.
