What Just Happened

A coalition of major banks, including NatWest, Bank of America, ING, Capital One, New Zealand's ASB Bank, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, published a joint report warning that AI-powered shopping agents are creating new risks around scams, fraud, and data privacy. Their core message: the technology is moving faster than the industry standards and consumer protections built to keep pace with it.

The report lays out principles for how agentic commerce, AI tools that select and purchase goods on a shopper's behalf, should be developed, and the banks said they plan to bring a series of proposals to policymakers.

The Two Risks the Banks Flagged

  • Agents skip the human check. Some AI agents are being designed to enter a shopper's card information straight into a checkout page, cutting the person out of a step where they'd normally catch an error or a red flag before the payment goes through.
  • Agents can quietly downgrade payment protection. These agents could end up routing purchases through payment options that don't carry the same fraud protections as more secure alternatives, without the shopper ever knowing the difference.
Quick Insight

This is not a call to ban AI shopping agents. It's the industry that processes the payments saying the guardrails need to catch up before the volume gets too big to retrofit safely, clear labeling, transparent decision-making, and stronger data protection are the banks' own stated ask.

What the Banks Are Asking Regulators For

Their wish list includes clear labeling any time an AI is handling part of a purchase, a better public understanding of how these systems actually make decisions, and stronger protections around the personal data these tools collect.

What This Means If You're Building or Selling Through Agentic Commerce

If your storefront, marketplace listing, or checkout flow can be completed by an AI shopping agent on a customer's behalf, this report is a preview of the questions regulators and payment providers are about to start asking you directly. Waiting for the rules to be finalized before you look at your own flow means reacting under a deadline instead of getting ahead of it.

What We'd Tell a Client Right Now

Walk through your own checkout as if an AI agent were completing it: does it clearly disclose that an agent is involved, does it default to your most secure payment option rather than the path of least resistance, and is there still a clear point where a real customer can catch and correct a mistake before the order is placed? Those three questions cover most of what the banks are asking for.