There’s a New Standards War Brewing Around Identity, Data and Payments

The modern economy is running on integration debt.

For most of the past two decades, technology progress has been defined by platforms. Companies built proprietary stacks, walled gardens and bespoke integrations that differentiated products.

But these platform-driven solutions also compounded friction across the global economy. Identity lived in one place, data in another, money somewhere else entirely. Moving value across these domains required translation layers, reconciliation teams and compliance workarounds that slowed innovation while inflating cost.

In response, every major platform, network and consortium seems to now be coming out with its own framework for identity, commerce, payments, data exchange or AI coordination.

Emerging protocol standards such as Google’s Agentic Unified Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) credential frameworks, the global migration to ISO 20022, and Visa’s Commerce Enablement Data Platform (CEDP) may appear unrelated at first glance; but in practice, they are reinforcing one another. They aim to make identity verifiable, data portable and money programmable across ecosystems rather than within them.

What makes 2026 different is not that these new protocols are emerging, but that the market is starting to distinguish between protocol issuance and protocol enablement.

That distinction mirrors another inflection point in digital finance: the difference between token issuers and token service providers. Not everyone needed to mint a token to participate in the tokenized economy. And not everyone needs to own a protocol to benefit from standardization.

Read more: The Protocol Power Struggle Reshaping AI-Driven Commerce

Protocols Move From Plumbing to Power

Protocols are often described as neutral plumbing: shared rules that allow systems to interoperate. In practice, they can more reasonably come to resemble instruments of power. Whoever defines a protocol, after all, can set the constraints for value creation, data access and monetization downstream.

For much of the past decade, platforms pursued vertical integration as their primary strategy, allowing them to control the interface, the data, the transaction and the monetization. Protocols, when they existed, were internal or selectively exposed, while interoperability was a concession, not a goal. That model has come to reveal some spiderwebbing stress fractures under its own weight.

To understand why 2026’s protocol push matters, it may help to distinguish integration from interoperability. Integration is what dominated the last era: custom APIs, bilateral agreements and middleware designed to connect systems that were never meant to talk to each other. Interoperability, by contrast, is what happens when systems share a common language and trust framework from the start.

One of the clearest signals of this shift is Google’s push toward agentic commerce. The tech giant’s pair of agentic protocols, the UCP, aimed at merchants, and AP2 standards, aimed at payment firms, are not simply about enabling AI assistants to shop on behalf of users. They are about standardizing how autonomous agents discover products, authenticate users, negotiate terms and complete transactions across platforms.

The protocols only work if identity, product data and payment rails adhere to shared standards. Otherwise, agents will simply replicate today’s integration mess at machine speed.

See also: Why Messy Merchant Data Could Make B2B Payments More Expensive

Collapsing the Gaps Between Identity, Data and Money

Identity has long been a key hidden bottleneck in commerce. Fraud systems, compliance checks and risk scoring models all rely on fragmented signals stitched together after the fact.

Part of the reason for the bottleneck was that, for decades, payment systems treated data as an afterthought. Amounts moved quickly while context lagged behind, with reconciliation, compliance and analytics living in separate systems and combined by humans and middleware.

Two payment new protocols, the ISO 20022 cross-border messaging standard, and Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP), are taking aim at that legacy gap.

Often described as a technical upgrade, ISO 20022 is better understood as the semantic standardization of money, embedding rich, structured data directly into payment messages. A cross-border transaction no longer just moves funds but carries purpose, reference and compliance context in a machine-readable form. Crucially, ISO 20022 is not owned by a single platform. Its power comes from collective adoption. It demonstrates that not all standards are monetized through ownership. Some derive value precisely because no one controls them outright.

Visa’s CEDP illustrates the next layer of abstraction: protocol enablement without protocol ownership. CEDP exposes network-level intelligence such as risk signals, transaction context and merchant attributes through standardized interfaces that others can build upon.

The underlying tension across all these efforts can be viewed as one of control versus composition. Issuing a protocol offers the illusion of control: define the rules, capture the ecosystem, extract rents. But protocols only succeed when others adopt them, and adoption can require perceived neutrality, longevity and alignment.

Composition, by contrast, accepts that no single actor will own the entire stack. It focuses on building services that plug into multiple standards, translate between them and add differentiated value.

After all, in a world awash in protocols, composition may scale better than control.