HSBC Joins Asia-Pacific Push to Set Standards for AI Payments

What happened

The Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) launched an AI & Agentic Payments Working Group in mid-July 2026 with HSBC as a founding member. The group's mandate is to develop standards and frameworks for agentic payments, transactions where AI systems initiate and complete payments autonomously under preset rules without manual human approval. The initiative responds to growing adoption of AI-driven commerce in the region, including HSBC's May 2026 pilot with Mastercard testing end-to-end B2B agentic commerce for Singapore clients, and Alipay's AI Pay system processing over 120 million autonomous transactions in a single week in February 2026. The working group will focus on three core areas: defining liability when AI agents exceed their mandates or payments fail, creating identity verification and authentication protocols for AI systems, and ensuring interoperability across Asia-Pacific's fragmented payment networks and regulatory regimes.

Why it matters

Asia-Pacific currently has no agreed standard for who bears liability when an AI agent makes an unauthorised or erroneous payment, creating legal and operational uncertainty as autonomous transaction volumes scale. Traditional payment authentication relies on human identifiers like passwords and biometrics, which AI agents lack, requiring new registration and authentication protocols to distinguish legitimate AI activity from malicious exploitation. The region's patchwork of payment systems across markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia means AI agents cannot currently operate seamlessly cross-border. For HSBC, participation positions the bank to influence emerging standards that will shape how AI-driven commerce functions across a region where it maintains significant retail and commercial banking operations. The bank has been investing heavily in digital payment infrastructure, and involvement in standard-setting allows it to align product development with regulatory direction before frameworks solidify.

Bigger picture

The EPAA working group reflects a broader industry shift toward autonomous commerce, with Mastercard launching its own Agentic Payments Program and Visa exploring AI integration into commerce flows. The initiative is a traditional finance effort without reference to cryptocurrency or blockchain protocols, though the emphasis on interoperability raises questions about whether emerging standards will accommodate open payment rails or create proprietary ecosystems controlled by incumbent banks and card networks. The group's positions will feed into EPAA's 18-month engagement with ASEAN and APEC governments and central banks, with formal policy recommendations scheduled for the 51st ASEAN Summit and APEC Economic Leaders' Week in November 2027. This timeline suggests regulatory frameworks for AI payments in Asia-Pacific will begin taking shape over the next year, with early participants like HSBC positioned to shape rules around authentication, liability, and cross-border flows that could define regional commerce infrastructure for the next decade.

What to watch

Key milestones include the working group's development of shared standards for agent identity, authentication, and authorisation protocols, and its proposed trust and liability frameworks for autonomous transactions. The formal policy recommendations due in November 2027 will signal whether Asia-Pacific regulators adopt harmonised standards or allow divergent national approaches. HSBC's continued pilots and commercial rollout of agentic payment capabilities will indicate how quickly the bank moves from experimentation to production systems. Broader adoption metrics, such as transaction volumes processed by AI agents across major regional payment networks, will show whether autonomous commerce scales beyond early use cases. Finally, the extent to which emerging standards accommodate open payment protocols versus proprietary networks will determine whether traditional finance infrastructure remains dominant or faces competition from alternative rails.