Agentic commerce is no longer theoretical. AI-powered agents are already researching products, comparing prices, and completing transactions on behalf of consumers. For merchants, this shift is bigger than just a new channel. It fundamentally changes how identity, intent and risk are established and managed.
Merchants need a secure, intelligent trust layer that connects identity, risk and payments across both human and agent interactions, without exposing sensitive data or losing decisioning control. Just as importantly, merchants must be able to confidently distinguish legitimate AI agents acting on behalf of customers from malicious bots attempting to bypass safeguards. That is why Forter and Very Good Security (VGS) are expanding their partnership to evaluate trust in real-time and secure payments across agent interactions.
Agentic commerce is reshaping trust. By 2030, AI agents could represent up to $385 billion of U.S. ecommerce spending. This creates a massive new revenue channel for merchants but it also introduces new challenges:
- Identity is no longer anchored to checkout. AI agents can initiate and manage commerce interactions well before a merchant ever sees a payment credential for the transaction.
- Sensitive data flows across platforms and wallets. Card data can move between agent platforms, wallets, and processors, often beyond the boundaries of traditional merchant-controlled environments.
- Risk signals are fragmented and more limited. Agent-initiated transactions often arrive with fewer traditional signals, making it harder for risk teams to assess intent and authenticity. Agentic protocols are largely assertion-based today: they assert trustworthiness via an agent registry certificate or purchase mandate. Risk signals available during the Customer-to-Agent interaction are not always passed to the merchant during the Agent-to-Merchant interaction, limiting merchants' ability to assess risk.
Together, Forter and VGS are designing trusted agentic commerce credentials by combining:
- Forter's real-time identity intelligence, associated with the payment token at the point of provisioning. This ensures that when an agent shares a token with a merchant, the trust assessment data travels with it, keeping transactions secure from start to finish.
- VGS's neutral tokenization infrastructure enables agents and merchants to use secure payment credentials at checkout while protecting cardholder data and supporting multi-PSP agentic transactions.
“Together, we're ensuring that the risk signals captured during the Customer-to-Agent interaction persist downstream to the merchant,” said Forter's Director of AI, Adam Davies. “By leveraging Forter's identity intelligence alongside VGS tokenization at the point of provisioning, we're reducing the data leakage that occurs when an agent acts on behalf of a customer, empowering merchants to make accurate risk decisions and unlocking a seamless, secure experience for trusted customers while keeping malicious actors out.”
This partnership expansion follows Forter's recent launch of Agentic Orchestration, which helps merchants simplify the technical complexity required to support agentic commerce through a single integration.
“As commerce evolves toward agent-driven experiences, tokenization becomes a framework to ensure trust and data security evolves alongside it,” said Howard Xiao, Head of Partnerships at VGS. “Our expanded partnership with Forter brings together their real-time identity intelligence and VGS's secure, neutral token infrastructure to give AI Platforms and merchants access to agentic payment credentials enriched with real-time risk insights. And we have a shared vision to ensure merchants can confidently accept legitimate agentic transactions while blocking malicious actors.”
Looking ahead, Forter and VGS see agentic commerce as the start of a broader shift where identity and payments work together to create loyalty-driven, permission-based experiences. As agents become more embedded in consumer shopping, trust will increasingly be defined by intelligence and infrastructure working in concert, not by point solutions.
To learn more about how Forter & VGS can work for you, visit forter.com/partners/vgs.
