Payments 1.0 to 5.0: Pathways to Agentic Autonomy

This chapter traces the evolution from Payments 1.0 (cash) through 2.0 (cards), 3.0 (e-commerce and wallets), and 4.0 (real-time rails with machine learning) to Payments 5.0 agentic autonomy. Agentic payments are intelligent, intent-driven systems where software agents understand user goals, plan execution across risk assessment, authentication, funding and rewards, then act within safety guardrails while providing clear explanations. This chapter presents the architecture with five components: intent capture, tool-augmented planning, policy, safety, action and verification with dry-runs and cryptographic trails, and privacy-preserving learning . Key metrics include approval rates, fraud detection precision and recall, payment speed, and explanation quality. Use cases include proactive bill pay, agentic wallets and dispute resolution. The chapter analyzes threats such as prompt injection and tool abuse, proposing mitigations like least-privilege access and rate limiting.