Affirm and Stripe Team to Combine BNPL and Agentic AI
Pay later provider Affirm is expanding its partnership with payments company Stripe.
The expanded collaboration is designed to support shared payment tokens (SPT), which allow AI agents to make purchases with a shopper’s permission and preferred payment method without exposing sensitive credentials, the companies announced Tuesday (March 3).
Eventually, the partnership will bring Affirm’s pay-over-time options to checkout in “AI-driven commerce experiences,” the companies said in a news release.
This will let shoppers see the total cost upfront and choose a clear repayment plan even when an AI assistant is helping them browse and buy, and allow merchants to accept those payments on the backend through Stripe.
“Commerce is evolving quickly in this golden age of AI, though the value and standard for paying over time remain durable and even more relevant,” said Vishal Kapoor, senior vice president of product at Affirm.
“As AI agents help people make better purchasing decisions, consumers will want to see the total cost upfront, choose a clear repayment plan, and know that there are no hidden fees. Affirm was built AI native from the beginning, and this is what we’re excited to bring into agentic commerce with the support of partners like Stripe.”
“Integrating Affirm into agentic payments helps businesses drive conversion while giving shoppers more choice in how they pay,” added Kevin Miller, head of payments at Stripe.
SPTs are designed to let any merchant that offers Affirm — regardless of whether they have a direct Stripe integration — accept these transactions in agentic flows when supported by the AI platform. This capability will be offered for Stripe’s direct merchants, but will become available for merchants not handling payments with Stripe later in the year.
In other agentic commerce news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the way the technology has ushered in the need for KYA (Know Your Agent) security standards, similar to KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business).
In an interview with PYMNTS, Trulioo Chief Product Officer Zac Cohen described KYA as a natural extension of compliance practices.
“We want to understand who the agents are,” he said. “We want to make sure that they carry the instructions and the prompts of the individual specifically of how they should be.”
Cohen also pointed to liability as a gating issue for agentic commerce. “That’s the big sticking point for a lot of these transactions to really take off,” he told PYMNTS.
The report also posited another layer: “Know Your Human.” That means making sure a real person authorized the instruction “and that the agent executing it remains within that delegation,” PYMNTS wrote.
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