Agentic commerce introduces a structural shift in payments
Traditional infrastructure was built around a four-party risk model — consumer, merchant, issuing bank, and acquiring bank — where humans initiated transactions. As AI agents begin acting autonomously, that model no longer holds.
Payment systems were not designed to consistently preserve identity, intent, and context in a machine-verifiable way, leaving merchants to bear the burden of authentication without the benefit of fraud filters, security protocols, or shared liability with issuers.
Introducing the Unified Trust Layer
The Unified Trust Layer is an open industry framework developed by IXOPAY and Zip to make AI-initiated transactions verifiable, auditable, and interoperable across the payments ecosystem. Take a look at a prototype for the agentic trust layer. This illustrates the vision for this agentic trust framework.
Our Goal
Create a shared standard for evaluating agent trust, giving merchants and payment platforms not only a tool to analyze risk, but an opportunity to help shape the future of agentic commerce.
Join the Merchant Council
By joining the Merchant Council for the Trust Layer you’ll:
Gain Early Access. Be the first to use this framework in real life. As a member of the collaboration framework, you’ll get access to the unified trust layer before anyone else. Open Agentic revenue before your competitors.
Shape the standard before it shapes you. Early participants define what legitimate agent behavior looks like — before networks, PSPs, or regulators do it for you.
Become the thought-leader. Take your learnings and shape your business outcomes. Enterprise buyers and partners will ask how you handle agentic trust. Participants can answer that question from a position of leadership, not reaction.
Co-branding and GTM Opportunities. Have your logo featured on the website as a participant in the framework. Access to co-branding alongside ZIP and IXOPAY around the Trust Framework updates.
Tap into the network. Get a thorough understanding of Agentic Protocols from leading experts in payments. Take those learnings and reduce risk and fraud.
Proposed Capabilities
Agent Identity Validation
Normalize identity verification and behavior patterns across fragmented agentic protocols.
Intent Capture and Preservation
Bind explicit human consent and transaction context into an immutable, replayable record.
Contextual Trust Signaling
Aggregate agent behavioral signals across providers, networks, and protocols to support informed authorization decisions and strengthen dispute defensibility.