The Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA), a membership organisation for the Asia Pacific (APAC) payments sector, has launched an AI & Agentic Payments Working Group with HSBC as a founding member.
In a statement, EPAA said the initiative will bring together banks, payment networks, fintechs and technology platforms to develop standards and frameworks to support agentic commerce across APAC.
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The launch comes as AI agents begin to initiate payments on behalf of consumers and businesses in the region.
In May, HSBC, together with Mastercard, tested end-to-end B2B agentic commerce transactions for two Singapore-based clients. Separately, Alipay’s AI Pay exceeded 120 million autonomous transactions in a single week in February.
EPAA said there is currently no “agreed standard” across APAC on who is liable when an AI agent exceeds its mandate.
It also flagged unresolved issues around cross-border identification and authentication of agents, the ability of fraud monitoring tools to distinguish legitimate agent activity from compromised accounts, and dispute handling when transactions are initiated by software rather than a person.
The working group is intended as an industry-wide effort to address these issues collectively.
According to the association, the group will develop shared standards and supporting infrastructure for agent identity, authentication and authorisation. It will also work on trust and liability frameworks for cases where an agent acts beyond its mandate or when a payment fails.
EPAA added that the group will examine business and commercial frameworks for scaling agentic commerce, coordinate engagement with regulators across ASEAN and APEC, and produce toolkits, briefings and operational intelligence for member organisations.
The association said the group’s positions will be developed through EPAA’s 18-month engagement process with ASEAN and APEC governments and central banks. Formal policy paper recommendations are scheduled for the 51st ASEAN Summit and APEC Economic Leaders’ Week in November 2027.
Emerging Payments Association Asia CEO Camilla Bullock said: “The EPAA AI & Agentic Payments Working Group brings the right organisations together to define the standards, infrastructure and frameworks that agentic commerce demands, and takes those positions directly to the regulators and governments across ASEAN and APEC.
“The organisations that help build these frameworks now will shape how agentic commerce works across Asia Pacific for the next decade.”
EPAA said places on the AI & Agentic Payments Working Group are open to member organisations across the APAC payments ecosystem.
It said the committee level will include 10–12 organisations, while the wider working group will include up to 30 organisations.
