Fed Governor Says B2B Payments Primed for Agentic Commerce
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said on Tuesday, Sept. 29 that B2B purchasing is intrinsically suited to agentic commerce because firms already enforce spending rules around approved suppliers, budgets and recurring patterns. A September 2025 PYMNTS Intelligence report found that nearly 7% of U.S. enterprise CFOs had deployed agentic AI in live finance workflows, with another 5% running pilots.
Waller noted that existing procurement controls — approved‑vendor lists, budget caps and contract terms — can serve as credentials that AI agents carry and counterparties verify. Because corporate payments span ACH, wires, instant cards and other rails, an agent can compare cost, speed, supplier preference and working‑capital impact before choosing how money moves. That shifts the competitive focus for payments firms from pure execution to the orchestration layer that decides which rail wins each transaction. Waller also flagged authentication, liability and fraud as central challenges, noting that an agent’s spending limits may differ by supplier, business unit or transaction size.
“B2B purchasing is intrinsically well suited to agentic commerce because businesses already surround spending with explicit rules around approved suppliers, budget limits and recurring purchasing patterns,” Christopher Waller, Federal Reserve Governor said.
“Payment execution alone is increasingly commoditized. The durable value as I see it today is in making the right payment decisions,” Andrew Ng, Head of Payments and Embedded Finance, Tungsten Automation said.
Enterprises have spent decades building rules around procurement, with approved‑vendor lists dictating where employees can buy, budgets limiting how much they can spend, contracts setting prices and terms, and treasury policies governing money movement. Earlier PYMNTS coverage highlighted that autonomy in payments creates a new authentication problem, requiring infrastructure to understand an agent’s scope of authority acr
What we know
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said in a Tuesday (Sept. 29) speech that B2B purchasing is intrinsically well suited to agentic commerce because businesses already surround spending with explicit rules around approved suppliers, budget limits and recurring purchasing patterns.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Agentic AI Went From Zero to CFO Test Runs in 90 Days” found in September 2025 that nearly 7% of enterprise CFOs in the United States had deployed agentic AI in live finance workflows, while an additional 5% were running pilots.
Mastercard and Visa are both developing infrastructure for agent-initiated commerce, while banks, stablecoin providers and enterprise software companies are exploring their own approaches to machine payments.
Of course, corporate transactions can be substantially larger than consumer purchases, magnifying losses when an agent makes an error or exceeds its authority.
“Payment execution alone is increasingly commoditized. The durable value as I see it today is in making the right payment decisions,” Tungsten Automation Head of Payments and Embedded Finance Andrew Ng told PYMNTS for the September edition of the “What’s Next in Payments Series: The Fall Draft.”