Agentic Commerce and the quiet return of Guest Checkout

Agentic commerce is steadily rewiring how digital transactions occur. Instead of shoppers manually navigating screens, entering credentials and approving each step, intelligent software agents are beginning to select products, optimise pricing and initiate payment on the user’s behalf.

The quiet return of Guest Checkout

In that environment, the long-maligned guest checkout flow is gaining fresh relevance—not as a stopgap, but as a structurally efficient payment model.

For years, the payments industry assumed that lower friction would come primarily through wallets, stored credentials and persistent user accounts.

Yet checkout friction has remained stubbornly high.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence, including its joint work with Mastercard, shows that manual data entry, multi-step authentication and consumer confusion around checkout options continue to drive cart abandonment.

The issue is not a lack of technology, but an excess of consumer involvement at the wrong moment.

Why Agentic Commerce Changes the Checkout Equation

Agentic commerce flips the operating model. The consumer no longer actively executes checkout; software does.

Wallets, which rely on user attention, explicit selection and brand-level engagement, become less effective when the “shopper” is an algorithm operating across devices, browsers and contexts.

This is where network-based guest checkout re-enters the frame.

Rather than forcing consumers—or their agents—into proprietary ecosystems, guest checkout enables fast completion without account creation or wallet invocation. In an agent-driven flow, that simplicity is not a compromise; it is a feature.

SRC 1.5 and the Re-Engineering of Guest Checkout

The latest iteration of EMV Secure Remote Commerce fundamentally alters what guest checkout can be. EMVCo’s SRC 1.5 specification emphasises interoperability, automation and credential portability—qualities essential for agentic environments.

A critical upgrade is the introduction of passkeys, based on FIDO Alliance standards.

Passkeys remove repeated one-time passcodes and allow biometric or device-level authentication, sharply reducing friction.

At the same time, SRC maintains network tokenisation and cryptographic binding, meaning raw card details are never exposed during guest checkout.

Because SRC is device- and browser-agnostic, it aligns naturally with AI agents that operate across platforms. An agent can surface eligible cards, authenticate securely and complete payment without redirecting the user into a wallet or account flow.

Economic Incentives for Networks and Banks

The resurgence of guest checkout is not just a UX story; it is an economic one.

SRC preserves network brand presence and routing control in a world where wallets risk disintermediating both.

For issuing banks, SRC keeps enrolment, authentication and fraud management anchored at the network layer, rather than handing visibility to Big Tech platforms.

As commerce becomes more autonomous, the most scalable checkout model may be the one that removes the consumer almost entirely from the process.

In agentic commerce, the fastest path to payment is increasingly the one that asks the human to do virtually nothing at all.