Fime launches agentic commerce trust layer service

Businesses are racing to establish a way to trust AI agents with financial transactions. Fime has introduced a framework it will sell as “trust-as-a-service” to do just that.

The new FACT (Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust) is designed for financial institutions, merchants and payment technology providers to manage secure transactions with AI agents.

The challenge of how to apply the authentication, authorization, audit trail and related considerations of agentic interaction could unlock an enormous global market, and accordingly has drawn considerable attention. A handful of potential solutions have been proposed, so far, but the market is nascent.

Biometric Update asked Fime CEO Lionel Grosclaude about how FACT aligns with other efforts to increase agentic trust, like MCP.

“FACT is designed as a trust and audit layer that sits above the merchant communication protocol, so it aligns with MCP in a complementary way rather than competing with it. While MCP, A2A, or REST define how agents and merchants exchange messages and execute transactions, FACT operates independently of those rails to provide a continuous agentic audit across the whole journey,” Grosclaude wrote in an email.

FACT operates as an independent trust layer the provides intent validation to protect the consumer’s or enterprise’s interest, real-time policy and compliance monitoring, Fime says in a company announcement. The service includes transaction-level trust attestation and verifies trust through independent auditor agents.

Merchants using FACT can accept transactions initiated by AI agents, while banks and payment networks get more authorization, fraud prevention and risk management data, according to the announcement. Consumer control is protected, and regulators gain transparency and real-time oversight.

“Agentic commerce is not a future concept. It is already emerging across payment and digital ecosystems. But while we have built systems that allow AI to transact, we have not yet built systems that allow us to trust those transactions at scale,” says Grosclaude in the company announcement. “FACT introduces the missing layer: a neutral, continuously verifiable trust infrastructure that enables autonomous commerce to grow safely, transparently and globally. This is critical to mass adoption of agentic commerce so we are actively engaging with the ecosystem already and will share updates on pilots soon.”

Fime says FACT builds on its work in payments and digital identity standards, certification and real-world implementations.

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  digital identity  |  FACT (Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust)  |  Fime  |  non-human identities