A new standards battle is reshaping identity, data and payments

A quiet but consequential standards war is emerging across identity, data and payments.

A new standards battle is brewing

After two decades defined by proprietary platforms and bespoke integrations, the global digital economy is confronting the cost of its own success: mounting integration debt.

Systems that were never designed to interoperate have been stitched together with custom APIs, middleware and compliance workarounds, slowing innovation while increasing operational risk.

In response, a new generation of standards is taking shape.

They are not designed to build the next platform empire, but to make identity verifiable, data portable and money programmable across ecosystems rather than within them.

The shift is subtle, but strategically significant.

From Platform Control to Protocol Competition

For much of the past decade, platforms pursued vertical integration as the dominant strategy.

Control of the interface, the data and the transaction enabled scale and monetisation, but at the expense of interoperability. Protocols, where they existed, were often internal or selectively exposed.

That model is now under strain.

Every major network, technology firm and consortium appears to be launching its own framework for commerce, payments, data exchange or AI coordination.

At first glance, these initiatives look fragmented. In practice, many are converging around the same objective: reducing friction between identity, data and money.

What distinguishes the current moment is the market’s growing ability to separate protocol issuance from protocol enablement.

Much as tokenisation demonstrated that not every participant needs to mint a token to benefit from tokenised finance, standardisation is revealing that owning a protocol is not the only route to influence.

Interoperability Replaces Integration

To understand why this matters, it helps to distinguish integration from interoperability.

Integration defined the last era: bilateral agreements and custom connections linking systems after the fact.

Interoperability, by contrast, is achieved when systems share a common language and trust framework from the outset.

This is the logic underpinning Google’s push into agentic commerce.

Its emerging protocols are not simply about enabling AI assistants to shop on behalf of users.

They are about standardising how autonomous agents authenticate identity, discover products, negotiate terms and complete payments across platforms.

Without shared standards, agentic commerce would merely replicate today’s integration mess at machine speed.

Collapsing the Gaps Between Identity, Data and Money

Payments standards are evolving in parallel.

ISO 20022 is often framed as a technical upgrade, but its deeper significance lies in semantic standardisation.

Payments increasingly carry rich, structured data — purpose, reference and compliance context — embedded directly into the transaction. Money no longer moves alone.

Crucially, ISO 20022 derives power from collective adoption rather than ownership. Its neutrality underlines a core truth of successful standards: longevity and trust often matter more than control.

At the network level, Visa’s Commerce Enablement Data Platform illustrates a different approach.

Rather than issuing a new protocol, it enables others by exposing standardised access to network intelligence such as risk signals and transaction context. This is protocol leverage without protocol ownership.

Why Composition May Win in 2026

The tension running through these developments is one of control versus composition.

Issuing a protocol offers the promise of ecosystem control, but only succeeds if others adopt it.

Composition accepts a more fragmented reality, focusing instead on services that plug into multiple standards, translate between them and add differentiated value.

As standards proliferate, composition may prove the more scalable strategy. In a world awash with protocols, enablement — not ownership — increasingly looks like the winning play.