New · 60–90 days
Is your card program ready to be presented by an AI agent?
The next checkout isn’t a page. It’s an agent in ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own assistant, choosing a payment method on the customer’s behalf. Issuers are already moving: store cards are being embedded into ChatGPT, and BNPL providers have wired their options into agent checkouts through Stripe and Google. Agents default to card-on-file. A card program an agent can’t discover, explain, and prequalify won’t be chosen.
The agent-readiness checklist
Ten questions. If you can’t answer yes to at least seven, your program will be invisible to agent-driven checkout when the volume arrives.
- Are your card’s terms, promo financing offers, and eligibility rules published in a structured, machine-readable form — not just a PDF and a banner?
- Can an authorized agent call a prequalification endpoint with proper consumer consent and get a soft-pull decision in under a few seconds?
- Is your card provisioned to digital wallets at approval, so an agent can use it immediately?
- Do your required disclosures and adverse-action notices work inside a conversational flow, not only on a web page?
- Have you and your issuer agreed who is the “creditor’s agent” when a third-party shopping agent presents the offer?
- Is your card program registered with the network agent programs (Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay) through your issuer and processor?
- Can you distinguish agent-originated applications and purchases in your analytics?
- Does your offer appear correctly when an AI assistant is asked “what are the payment options at [your brand]?” (This is a search-optimization problem now.)
- Is promotional financing (e.g., 0% for 18 months) representable as a comparable option alongside pay-in-4 in an agent’s recommendation?
- Has anyone at your company or your issuer actually run a test purchase of your product through an agent checkout?
The engagement
- Weeks 1–2: Exposure assessment. Where your card shows up (and doesn’t) across the major agent surfaces today; what your issuer has shipped or announced; a gap list against the checklist.
- Weeks 3–6: Offer and prequal design. The structured representation of your terms and promos; the prequalification and consent flow an agent can call; the conversational disclosure design, drafted for your compliance and the issuer’s.
- Weeks 7–12: Issuer workstream and instrumentation. The change requests and business case to your issuer; analytics to separate agent-originated flow; a pilot plan for one agent surface.
Scoped per program; typically $40–60k. Often bundled with the Credit Conversion Redesign, since the same prequalification and offer work serves both.
Why now, and why not later
Agent-originated volume is small today and the standards are still moving. That is exactly the window: the issuers are deciding their integrations this year, and the merchants who show up with a ready program and a clear ask get sequenced first. The ones who wait inherit whatever default the issuer ships.
I’ve spent a decade building credit acquisition inside issuer-partner constraints and am writing a book on where pay-later is taking checkout. This is the work I think about most.
Find out where your program stands.
A 30-minute call and I’ll tell you which of the ten you’re likely failing and what the first fix is.