IXOPAY and Zip US Introduce Unified Trust Layer Framework to Help Merchants Reduce Risk in Agentic Commerce

WHY THIS MATTERS: The move by IXOPAY and Zip to establish a “Unified Trust Layer” is a preemptive strike against what many see as the biggest impediment to mass adoption of AI: systemic payments risk. As autonomous software agents—from personal AI assistants to enterprise bots—begin to execute financial decisions, the traditional liability model is rendered obsolete. Merchants currently face a scenario where they absorb the authentication burden for transactions they didn’t initiate with a human, exposing them to devastating waves of synthetic identity fraud and chargebacks. This framework is crucial because it elevates the concept of payment orchestration to trust orchestration, ensuring that identity and explicit human intent are preserved, auditable, and bound to the transaction.

For the entire Agentic Commerce ecosystem to scale beyond novelty, the industry must collaboratively define this open standard now to prevent risk concerns from throttling innovation.

IXOPAY, the enterprise-grade global payment infrastructure platform built for the era of agentic commerce, and Zip, (ASX: ZIP), the digital financial services company offering innovative, people-centred products, today announced a joint initiative to define a Unified Trust Layer — an open industry framework designed to address emerging trust and liability challenges in agent-initiated commerce and payments.

Agentic commerce introduces a structural shift in payments. Traditional infrastructure was built around a four-party risk model — consumer, merchant, issuing bank, and acquiring bank — with the assumption that a human initiated the transaction. As AI agents begin acting autonomously, that model no longer holds. Payment systems were not designed to consistently preserve identity, intent, and context in a machine-verifiable way, leaving merchants to bear the burden of authentication without the benefit of fraud filters, security protocols, or shared liability with issuers.

With this risk shifting downstream, merchants will face increased chargebacks, elevated false declines due to fraud systems misclassifying legitimate agents, and reduced visibility into customer relationships as agents intermediate the experience. Industry leaders recognize the urgency: according to a recent Accenture study, 87% of financial institution chief technology officers and payments heads believe trust will be the most significant barrier to agentic payments adoption, and 78% expect fraud to increase significantly as agentic commerce scales.

The Unified Trust Layer Framework

Confronting this structural shift head-on, IXOPAY and Zip are developing a Unified Trust Layer framework, an open industry initiative that embeds transparency, auditability, and interoperability into agent-driven transactions, setting a new standard for trust in agentic commerce. The framework seeks to aggregate and orchestrate trust signals across providers, networks, and protocols while preserving merchant-owned, portable trust artifacts.

“Payments infrastructure wasn’t built for autonomous actors,” said Jill Willard, Chief Technology Officer at IXOPAY. “When AI agents initiate transactions, merchants still carry the liability, but the system doesn’t consistently preserve identity and intent in a defensible way. At IXOPAY, we view tokenization and orchestration as programmable trust infrastructure, giving merchants control, portability, and auditability across fragmented ecosystems. This initiative is about extending that integrated foundation to agentic commerce.”

“Traditional fraud models rely heavily on static credentials,” said Rory Herriman, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Zip. “But agents aren’t people, and their risk doesn’t show up the same way. We’ve connected millions of consumers with tens of thousands of merchants through our ability to establish trust using behavioral and contextual signals. As machines begin transacting on behalf of humans, that same discipline needs to be applied to agent behavior. This framework is about making trust measurable and explainable in a system that was never built for it.”

From Payment Orchestration to Trust Orchestration

In an agentic environment, orchestration evolves from routing transactions to managing tokenized trust across protocols and providers. The proposed Unified Trust Layer centers on three capabilities:

• Agent Identity Validation: Normalizing identity verification and behavior patterns across fragmented agentic protocols.

• Intent Capture and Preservation: Binding explicit human consent and transaction context into an immutable, replayable record.

• Contextual Trust Signaling: Aggregating agent behavioral signals across providers, networks, and protocols to support informed authorization decisions and strengthen dispute defensibility.

Together, IXOPAY and Zip combine merchant-owned, provider-agnostic tokenization with real-time behavioral intelligence.

Open and Collaborative

The Unified Trust Layer is an open framework in development. IXOPAY and Zip invite merchants, networks, platforms, and ecosystem participants to help shape how identity, intent, and trust should function in agentic commerce. 

Learn more about the framework, and how to participate at our upcoming webinar on April 8, 2026: https://www.ixopay.com/unified-trust.

FF NEWS TAKE: This initiative is a critical, needle-moving step. The existing fraud infrastructure cannot cope with machines acting as autonomous payers; a foundational standard is required to measure and defend risk. The key next watch point is the industry response: will major card networks and acquiring banks integrate into this open framework, or attempt to create proprietary trust solutions? True interoperability hinges on widespread adoption of this new definition of trust.