PPRO launches a Local Payments Council to write agentic-commerce rules for European A2A methods

PPRO launched the Local Payments Council for Agentic Commerce in London, with BLIK, EPI, Bancontact Company and DIAS as founding members alongside PPRO; the release says further payment schemes have committed to joining. The council will develop common technical standards for how local payment methods plug into agentic protocols, working through working groups, technical collaboration and hackathons, and will feed its output into wider global frameworks.

It names five focus areas: out-of-band authorisation and session hand-off, agent identity and attestation for non-card rails, consent and delegated authority, disputes, refunds and liability, and discoverability on agent surfaces.

The agentic-commerce frameworks published so far are card-network frameworks, and the European acceptance mix is not card-only: BLIK carries most of Polish e-commerce, Bancontact most of Belgian, and EPI's Wero is the rail the European banks are standing up. If agent-initiated checkout only speaks card, the methods that European merchants built their conversion on drop out of a channel at the moment it forms.

The council is the A2A side organising to keep its rails addressable, and its liability and dispute workstream is the part merchants will feel, because agent-initiated chargebacks have no settled rulebook on non-card rails.

• Which further schemes join and whether iDEAL, Bizum, Swish or MB WAY appear
• Whether the council's specifications converge with the card networks' agent protocols or fork from them
• The first published standard for out-of-band authorisation on a non-card rail

• ppro.com