Stripe, Affirm, and Klarna Integrate BNPL into AI Agent Payments via Shared Payment Tokens

Affirm and Klarna Simultaneously Expand Stripe Partnerships, Building BNPL Infrastructure for AI Agents

Affirm and Stripe Team to Combine BNPL and Agentic AI | PYMNTS.com

Pay later provider Affirm is expanding its partnership with payments company Stripe. The expanded collaboration is designed to support shared payment

On March 3, 2026, BNPL (buy now, pay later) leaders Affirm and Klarna announced expanded partnerships with Stripe in quick succession. Both companies are adopting Stripe's "Shared Payment Tokens" (SPT), building the infrastructure for AI agents to process BNPL payments.

On the same day, Stripe announced support for Visa and Mastercard "agentic network tokens" on its official blog. This enables card payments, BNPL, and network tokens to be processed uniformly through SPT as a single primitive.

Affirm SVP of Product Vishal Kapoor emphasized that even in an era where AI assists purchases, consumers still demand cost transparency and clear repayment plans, highlighting Affirm's significance as an AI-native platform.

Background and Industry Trends

The payment infrastructure for agentic commerce has been evolving rapidly since the second half of 2025. Stripe launched SPT in 2025 and enabled instant checkout on ChatGPT through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) co-developed with OpenAI. Major players such as Etsy and URBN (Anthropologie, Free People, Urban Outfitters) have already adopted SPT.

Meanwhile, a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey found that 81% of U.S. consumers expressed willingness to use agentic commerce tools, with over $1 trillion in spending potentially affected. McKinsey's October 2025 report also projected up to $1 trillion in the U.S. alone and $5 trillion globally in retail opportunities by 2030.

Amid this market potential, a key challenge was the limitation of payment method choices in AI agent-mediated transactions. Traditional agentic payments tended to be restricted to "card on file" (pre-registered cards), leaving alternative payment methods like BNPL unavailable. This development addresses that structural gap.

Technical Architecture of Shared Payment Tokens and Visa/Mastercard Integration

Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens (SPT) is a payment primitive designed specifically for agentic commerce. Here is how it works.

When a consumer authorizes a purchase on an AI platform, Stripe issues an SPT scoped to the specific transaction. The AI agent uses this token to initiate payment, but never gains access to the consumer's actual card information or credentials. SPTs can be configured with spending limits and expiration periods and can be revoked at any time. They also integrate with Stripe's fraud detection system "Radar" to detect fraudulent transactions in real time.

This expansion enables three types of tokens to be processed behind SPT.

First, support for "Visa Intelligent Commerce" and "Mastercard Agent Pay." When a consumer authorizes an agent to make a purchase, Stripe provisions agentic network tokens from Visa and Mastercard. Visa SVP Rubail Birwadker stated that the partnership with Stripe delivers trust and security to agent-driven payments. Mastercard CDO Pablo Fourez also positioned Agent Pay as the foundation for extending network tokenization to AI payments.

Second, BNPL support. When a consumer selects BNPL, Stripe displays the BNPL provider's confirmation page within the agent's UI and securely passes the merchant's credentials to the BNPL provider. For Affirm, consumers complete a real-time eligibility check, select a repayment plan, and finalize the purchase on the AI platform.

Importantly, even merchants not directly integrated with Stripe can accept agentic payments by forwarding SPTs to their own payment systems. For Affirm support, merchants directly integrated with Stripe will gain early access, with expansion to non-Stripe merchants planned for the second half of 2026.

Stripe Co-Founders Signal a Realistic View of "Staged Evolution"

While advancing infrastructure development, Stripe itself has taken a measured view of agentic commerce progress. Co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison classified agentic commerce into five stages in their annual letter published last week.

The industry currently sits at the "boundary of Levels 1 and 2," transitioning from the stage of searching by specific product attributes to the stage of describing situations and requesting purchases. At the ultimate Level 5, agents autonomously handle purchasing and delivery based on budgets and schedules.

Circuit & Chisel CEO Louis Amira (former Stripe head of crypto and AI partnerships), whose startup received Stripe backing, also acknowledged that with multiple competing protocols, the industry is not yet at a stage for large-scale investment decisions. Stripe's annual letter drew parallels to the mid-1990s internet protocol formation era.

Impact and Implications for E-Commerce Businesses

This development brings three practical impacts for e-commerce businesses.

First, "ease of adoption." Merchants already processing payments through Stripe and offering Affirm or Klarna can accept BNPL payments via AI agents without additional integration work. According to Stripe's blog, existing Stripe integrations can be made agentic-commerce-ready with as little as a single line of code change.

Second, "conversion rate improvement." Stripe's testing has confirmed up to a 14% revenue increase in BNPL-enabled sessions. With AI agents now able to present alternative payment methods, merchants can expect lower cart abandonment rates and higher average order values.

Third, "preparing for KYA (Know Your Agent) compliance." According to PYMNTS reporting, agentic commerce is introducing "KYA" -- identity verification for AI agents themselves -- as a new compliance requirement alongside traditional KYC (Know Your Customer). Trulioo CPO Zac Cohen noted that managing agent identity verification and delegation scope will be key to transaction growth. E-commerce businesses need to add security and compliance capabilities to their evaluation criteria when selecting payment infrastructure.

Conclusion

The simultaneous announcements by Stripe, Affirm, and Klarna symbolize the transition of agentic commerce payment infrastructure from a "card payments only" phase to one where diverse payment methods can be offered through AI agents. Integration with Visa and Mastercard network tokens also ensures compatibility with existing payment networks.

However, as Stripe itself acknowledges, the industry remains in its early stages. Multiple protocols -- ACP, Google A2A/UCP, Mastercard Agent Pay, and others -- are developing in parallel, and it remains unclear where the final standard will converge. For e-commerce businesses, the priority is to understand the agentic payment capabilities of major processors like Stripe and assess their own BNPL and payment method readiness. Expansion to non-Stripe merchants and additional payment methods is expected through the second half of 2026.