Authorisation and merchant choice in AI payments

Reserve Bank of Australia · Consultation submission ·

Recommends that the Bank set expectations for authorisation, duplicate-payment controls and transaction records before AI agents move money. Draws on PayTo and the New Payments Platform while preserving merchant choice of debit network within the payment method the customer authorises.

Read the submission on rba.gov.au (Word, 8 pages)

The document

Title
Response to the Review of Payments System Regulation, Issues Paper, June 2026
Review
Review of Payments System Regulation, Reserve Bank of Australia
Questions answered
Questions 6 and 19
Capacity
Personal capacity
Submitted
Length
8 pages, numbered paragraphs 1 to 16
Confidentiality
None. Provided for publication in full.

The case it puts

The Issues Paper identifies disputed transactions as a risk of more autonomous agent use, with the consumer’s intent to make a payment among the questions in dispute. That question becomes checkable when the consumer’s authority is written down as parameters carried with the authorisation and evaluated before execution.

Australia already operates the central part of that structure. A PayTo agreement carries the payment terms the customer has authorised, such as amount, purpose and frequency; it is managed in the customer’s own online banking; payments can be initiated only in accordance with those terms; and the customer can pause, resume or cancel it.

The same parameters bear on merchant choice. The payment method the agent may use is one of the things the customer authorises, so the customer’s authority constrains a choice that would otherwise follow the agent’s configuration.

The five properties it asks for

  1. Authority recorded as checkable parameters and evaluated before execution.
  2. No irreversible financial action before a check that fails closed. The check refuses on any absent, expired, suspended, revoked or unverifiable element.
  3. Duplicate payment initiation stopped by an idempotency key the receiving system enforces.
  4. An expiry operating alongside customer suspension and revocation. Pausing suspends and cancelling revokes, but each needs a separate instruction. An expiry ends the authority with no instruction at all.
  5. A record binding the authority, the payment and the merchant order, so a dispute is argued from the record rather than from recollection.

Stated as properties rather than as a named protocol, so payment providers and agent developers stay free to choose any implementation, and the expectation holds as agent architectures change.

On prioritisation

Agent-initiated payment is among the smallest issues in the Issues Paper by current activity, and among the most urgent by timing. The designs that will govern it are being set now, and the lead sits largely outside Australia.

The same point serves the Review’s interest in standardisation across cards and account-to-account payments. Agent-initiated payments are likely to span rails, and properties of the authorisation layer can be stated without reference to which rail carries the payment.

Sources