Affirm and Stripe Team to Combine BNPL and Agentic AI

Pay later provider Affirm is expanding its partnership with payments company Stripe.

The expanded collaboration is designed to support shared payment tokens (SPT), which allow AI agents to make purchases with a shopper’s permission and preferred payment method without exposing sensitive credentials, the companies announced Tuesday (March 3).

Eventually, the partnership will bring Affirm’s pay-over-time options to checkout in “AI-driven commerce experiences,” the companies said in a news release.

This will let shoppers see the total cost upfront and choose a clear repayment plan even when an AI assistant is helping them browse and buy, and allow merchants to accept those payments on the backend through Stripe.

“Integrating Affirm into agentic payments helps businesses drive conversion while giving shoppers more choice in how they pay,” added Kevin Miller, head of payments at Stripe.

SPTs are designed to let any merchant that offers Affirm — regardless of whether they have a direct Stripe integration — accept these transactions in agentic flows when supported by the AI platform. This capability will be offered for Stripe’s direct merchants, but will become available for merchants not handling payments with Stripe later in the year.

Stripe also announced a partnership with Klarna on Tuesday to enable flexible payments at U.S. merchants that offer Klarna through Stripe. That partnership is also powered by SPTs.

In other agentic commerce news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the way the technology has ushered in the need for KYA (Know Your Agent) security standards, similar to KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business).

In an interview with PYMNTS, Trulioo Chief Product Officer Zac Cohen described KYA as a natural extension of compliance practices.

“We want to understand who the agents are,” he said. “We want to make sure that they carry the instructions and the prompts of the individual specifically of how they should be.”

Cohen also pointed to liability as a gating issue for agentic commerce. “That’s the big sticking point for a lot of these transactions to really take off,” he told PYMNTS.

The report also posited another layer: “Know Your Human.” That means making sure a real person authorized the instruction “and that the agent executing it remains within that delegation,” PYMNTS wrote.