HM Treasury published its Financial Services AI Adoption Plan on 14 July 2026, alongside a companion consultation on Modernising Payment Services Regulation, both confirming that agentic commerce payments, where an AI agent initiates payments on a person’s behalf, are now a formal UK policy priority.
- Recommendation 10 of the Adoption Plan calls for an agentic payments trust framework, including a “Know Your Agent” standard and secure machine-to-machine authentication
- The companion consultation asks directly whether the Payment Services Regulations 2017 need to change to support autonomous agents
- The consultation closes 6 October 2026
- Both documents are published on GOV.UK under HM Treasury
The problem HM Treasury is confronting is structural. Regulation 67 of the PSRs 2017 requires a payer to consent to each specific transaction, or a defined series of transactions. An AI agent that decides which transaction to make, when, and to whom, within limits a customer set once, sits awkwardly inside that model. This is the core tension agentic commerce payments create for UK regulators: the consultation asks whether consent, authentication and unauthorised-transaction liability rules need rewriting to close that gap, rather than assuming existing law already covers it.
This matters most for regulated payment providers right now. Any PIS or AIS provider building agentic commerce payments products is building ahead of a settled liability framework, not within one. The FCA’s own March 2026 Payments Regulatory Priorities Report flagged the same tension months before Treasury’s consultation confirmed it as a live policy question.
Finexer does not currently offer agentic commerce payments products. Every payment Finexer initiates today requires explicit, per-transaction customer authorisation through Strong Customer Authentication, in line with the existing regulatory model this consultation is now reviewing. As the framework develops through October 2026 and beyond, Finexer will build against whatever consent standard HM Treasury and the FCA settle on, not ahead of it.
Read the consultation: Financial Services AI Adoption Plan – GOV.UK
About the Author
The Finexer Team is a collective of fintech engineers, payments specialists, and Open Banking experts working on financial infrastructure for UK businesses. Finexer builds API-driven solutions that allow companies to access real-time bank data, initiate Pay by Bank payments, and integrate financial services directly into their products.