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Contending that the payments business hasn’t kept up with the pace at which agentic commerce is unfolding, Cross River Bank said Wednesday it is working with Stripe on a project that combines the bank’s security with Stripe’s card-issuance platform.
The initiative arrives as agentic commerce is building momentum. But not all bankers are convinced the technology has been fully sussed out, a project Cross River has embarked on. “Consumers and businesses are increasingly relying on agents to act on their behalf, but the payments infrastructure has not kept pace,” says Gilles Gade, founder and chief executive at Fort Lee, N.J.-based Cross River, in a statement.
In announcing its work with Stripe, the bank argues agentic technology must support a wide range of functions reliably and in high volumes. These include issuing technology that can manage payment credentials tied to the user’s authorization, with details and limits regarding the merchant, the context of the transaction, and the sum of the purchase, along with verification of the end user and the agent.
As part of the current project, Cross River has worked with Stripe on the bank’s Link digital wallet, which includes single-use virtual cards and controls that prevent an AI agent from using or storing a user’s credit card or payment details. For agentic commerce, the wallet produces a single-use virtual card aimed exclusively at the transaction at hand, Cross River says.
As trends develop in agentic commerce, concerns about security will only grow more acute, the bank contends. “The core challenge in agentic commerce is trust, establishing that a transaction reflects genuine business intent, carried out by a verified agent, within the scope that the user authorized,” says Pravesh Rijal, Cross River’s chief AI officer, in a statement.
Trust and other issues surrounding agentic commerce are likely become more pressing as the trend unfolds and involves increasing purchase volumes. Global volume will total between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030, according to projections from McKinsey & Co., with the U.S. market accounting for between 10% and 20% of that spending.
