Ray Fernandez, Journalist from Espacio
The fastest-moving shift in agentic banking is not internal tools but agentic commerce. While surveys show that banks are levelling up their efforts to deploy AI internally, other reports found that consumers are increasingly starting and ending their shopping experience with AI agents.
These new AI agents, powered by new protocols, have fundamentally changed the way people spend and borrow money online. For all banks and fintech organizations, big, small, or medium, it’s time to integrate to the agentic era or risk underperformance and becoming invisible to many customers.
Internal AI Investment is High, but Agentic Commerce is Already Real
Accenture’s new Banking IT Executives Survey found that leading banks and financial organizations are investing heavily in building up tech teams to leverage AI benefits for in-house processes. However, the survey also found that only 18% have a formal AI agent lifecycle management model in place today.
While inner-facing banking and finance agentic AI tools continue to be developed, consumer-facing agentic commerce and banking has kicked off with strength.
Salesforce’s 2025 holiday report found that online sales hit record-breaking figures this season, totaling $1.29 trillion globally and $294 billion in the United States alone. The report highlights that the revenue influence of AI and AI agents was strong.
“To be successful in an agentic commerce world, you need to be thinking about the ability to be discovered by a new customer in a completely different way,” Alex Sion, a former GM for JPMorgan Chase & Co. who is now spearheading Blend 360’s AI financial services division, told Fintech Bloom.
Fundamentally, agentic commerce is about personal agents doing the shopping on behalf of customers. “Small and medium bank executives need to ask themselves, ‘Do I understand how AI agents working on behalf of a customer might make shopping decisions?’” said Sion.
“One thing is for certain, digital as THE primary discovery channel needs to be front and center,” he added.
How Can SMB Banks and Fintech Integrate Into Agentic Banking and Commerce?
“If I were running strategy or digital for a small or mid-size bank, I’d treat agentic commerce not as a ‘feature,’ but as an interface shift, just like the move from branches to digital wallets,” Rahul Chawda, Product Manager at Mastercard, speaking in a personal capacity, told Fintech Bloom.
For SMB banks, the strategic point for agentic commerce is survival through scalability, said Chawda.
Which Agentic Commerce Protocol Should Banks Choose?
From Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), launched in January 2026, to OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, leading AI companies have already developed the tools that banks, financial institutions, and retailers are using to drive AI agent sales.
Big banks and financial firms are also expected to develop new agentic commerce protocols and tools. However, at the same time, they are partnering with big tech to use their protocols. For example, PayPal and Stripe partnered with OpenAI, while American Express, Mastercard, and Visa, to name a few, have partnered with Google.
So, which protocol is a better fit for SMB banks and organizations?
“Both protocols solve adjacent but different layers of the stack,” said Chawda.
Google’s UCP pushes for structured, interoperable commerce intent across search, shopping, and payments, while OpenAI’s ACP is more focused on autonomous, multi-step financial and transactional workflows executed by agents, he said.
“For banks, in my view, ACP aligns more naturally with financial operations, risk checks, and regulatory traceability,” said Chawda.
Adopting both protocols is also a possibility. “Google for consumer-facing intent capture, ACP for actual financial execution,” he added. For bank leaders, the integration path is essentially the same: establish a protocol abstraction layer and avoid hard-coding to a single ecosystem. “More importantly, build adapters —- so that when any protocol becomes dominant, switching costs are trivial,” said Chawda.
Executives should consider that new agentic commerce protocols are likely to emerge.
“Banking is notorious for establishing its own protocols and networks, especially when it comes to payments and commerce,” said Sion. “I’d place my bets on an industry protocol yet to come.”
Third-party Agentic Integration Providers: A Must, or a Risk?
Not all banks and firms have devoted the resources that big banks have to the AI transformation. Additionally, the complexities of advanced agentic banking technologies, from regulatory to technical, create a demand for talent and services, which third-party providers are stepping up to fill in.
Should SMB banks consider agentic commerce partners for faster deployment?
“SMB Banks and fintech can often move faster than larger banks that are slowed down by complex structures and competing priorities,” Dina Vardouniotis, founder and CEO at Payments+Partnerships, told Fintech Bloom.
“Many community banks and credit unions are pursuing partnership strategies to access modern payment platforms and API-enabled experiences, allowing them to deliver seamless servicing despite having fewer internal resources,” she said.
While third-party orchestration and connectivity providers accelerate time-to-value and reduce risk exposure dramatically, executives and leaders should consider vendor lock-in and other third-party risks.
“The biggest trap: tying your future to a vendor that owns the agent logic rather than the bank owning the policies, business rules, and autonomy controls,” said Chawda. Banks must remain the ones who define “what good looks like,” not delegate those decisions
to a black-box vendor, he said.
Owning the Agentic Commerce Flow and Data
Agentic commerce flows are not just about commerce itself but about customer data, who owns it, and controls it. The competitive shift to watch will be how AI platforms emerge as marketplaces that power agentic buying journeys, said Vardouniotis. When AI agents own the entire journey, end to end, the agent-driven payments ecosystem becomes a game changer.
“Data has never been more important in acquiring, deepening and retaining customer relationships,” Vardouniotis added.
According to Chawda, “Data ownership negotiations must be baked into the earliest architectural and vendor decisions.”
Banks should enforce a “sovereign data boundary” model, that is, the agent may operate on the bank’s data, but the bank retains full ownership of raw data, derived features, and agent-state information, Chawda explained. Banks must also require formal separation between operational usage of data and model improvement pipelines.
“For SMB banks, strong data ownership positions are not about power, but they’re about regulatory survivability,” he said. “Without them, proving compliance or defending an audit becomes nearly impossible.”
The Bottom Line: ‘All Banking Executives Working On This’
Experts agree that agentic commerce is not optional but a shift that is already taking place at a rapid pace, both in the development of new tools and protocols, and driving revenue by changing consumers’ online behaviour and journeys.
The agentic banking and commerce transformation is complex, technically advanced, challenging, and time-consuming. “All banking executives should be working on this now and seeking ways to approach the journey re-design process in new ways,” said Sion.
