Mandate Verifier for issuer processors: was this agent allowed to spend?
Checks at authorization that a paying agent holds a valid, user-signed spending permission. Issuer processors pay.
Competitive · Processors ask whether agents were allowed
Written for: Small startup team
Next step
Call Tim Joslyn at Paymentology. Ask which fields would need to be in an authorization message for the issuer to decide an agent was allowed to spend, and which agent payment protocol their issuer clients ask about most.
Why now
What changed: the authorization question has moved from merchants to issuers and processors, who own the approve/decline decision and the dispute process, and a processor is now naming the gap in public. It stays on watch because there is still no dominant mandate format across card-network and crypto agent protocols. Building a verifier now means betting on a standard that may lose.
What became possible
Paymentology, an issuer processor, says payments infrastructure can confirm that a machine is legitimate but not whether it was allowed to make a given transaction. Coinbase described agentic payment protocols built with AWS at Sibos. A new Laravel package adds x402 stablecoin charges to an API in one line.
Two ways in
- Mandate check API
At authorization time, checks an agent's signed mandate (scope, merchant category, amount limits, expiry, revocation) and returns allow, step-up or decline, with a reason code.
- Customer
- Issuer processors and card-issuing fintechs
- Model
- Per-check fee with a monthly minimum
- Mandate dispute log
Stores the mandate, the agent's identity and the matching authorization record, so the issuer can resolve 'my agent did it' disputes.
- Customer
- Dispute operations teams at issuers
- Model
- Per-dispute fee
Competition
The card payment side is taken by Visa, Mastercard and AP2, and agent identity by Baselayer, Skyfire and the login providers. Decagon owns PACT and already sells a business-side gateway that enforces scopes, which is a serious risk for anything built on PACT.
Full competition notes (9 competitors)
The card payment side is taken by Visa, Mastercard and AP2, and agent identity by Baselayer, Skyfire and the login providers. Decagon owns PACT and already sells a business-side gateway that enforces scopes, which is a serious risk for anything built on PACT. What looks open is account-level actions at brokerages and neobanks (placing trades, ACH transfers, moving money between accounts) in two places. (1) Consent records designed as Reg E and dispute evidence: law firms disagree on, or call unsettled, whether a standing agent grant counts as authorized, and chargeback codes assume a human approved. (2) A user-facing registry to revoke a grant once across every site, since PACT grants live at each business separately. Decagon, Baselayer or Plaid could each add these features, so a new entrant would need to move fast, win early brokerage or neobank design partners, and sell it as a compliance and disputes product rather than identity infrastructure.
- Decagon Personal Agent Gateway / PACT
Decagon leads PACT (co-developed with Instinct, built on A2A and OAuth) and launched a gateway in early October 2026 that detects personal agents, enforces scopes and records consent. Consent is given by logging in with each business, not signed by the user, and I found no material on cross-site revocation.
- Google AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
Intent, Cart and Payment mandates as signed W3C verifiable credentials with price limits, timing and expiry that merchants verify. Closest match to the 'user-signed mandate' idea; Visa and Mastercard listed as launch partners.
- Mastercard Agent Pay
Agentic Tokens tie a card credential to a specific agent, merchant scope and consent policy (spending limit, expiry); the network enforces limits. Card payments only.
- Visa Trusted Agent Protocol / Intelligent Commerce
Signed HTTP headers attest agent identity, user consent and intent; merchants verify against Visa's registry. Card payments only.
- Baselayer
$35M Series A (Sept 2026) for Know Your Agent credentials naming who deployed the agent and the task it was authorized for. Says more than 2,000 financial institutions use its technology.
- Skyfire KYAPay
Open protocol with signed JWT identity tokens covering the agent platform, the agent and the human principal; published as an IETF draft.
- Stytch Connected Apps
OAuth-based scoped agent consent down to the API endpoint, plus monitoring and revoking agent sessions.
- Plaid Consent API
Records consent grants and revokes access to financial data; a natural place to add agent consent.
- Interactive Brokers / ThinkMarkets agent access
A single news roundup reports brokers opening scoped agent APIs (IBKR Claude integration, ThinkMarkets server with audit logs). Brokers are building this in-house for now.
Checked 2026-10-08
Risks
- Visa, Mastercard or Coinbase may build mandate checks into their own protocols and leave no room for a third party
- Rival standards could split the market before any one wins
- Processor sales cycles are long, so revenue may not arrive within the horizon
Strong team fit; tech readiness and open space and buildability are the weak point (5).
tech 5 · pull 6 · space 5 · fit 9 · build 5
Exposed
Companies that could benefit or be threatened. News and context, not investment advice.
Momentum of its main topic
Sources
Status history
- 2026-10-08 Added to the watchlist