Paris-based payments and digital identity certification firm Fime has launched FACT, short for Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust, pitching it as a neutral real-time trust layer between artificial intelligence agents and payment rails. The company says the framework is designed to let financial institutions, merchants, and payment networks verify, certify, and oversee transactions initiated by autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of users or enterprises.
Fime’s framing is that existing payment and trust infrastructures were designed for human-initiated transactions and do not have native controls for machine-initiated ones. As AI agents move from assistive roles into autonomous search, negotiation, and execution of transactions, Fime argues that compliance, fraud, and accountability gaps widen because relying parties have no standard way to assess whether a given agent is acting within a principal’s authorized intent at the moment of the transaction.
FACT is structured as a trust-as-a-service layer delivering four categories of independently verifiable signals in real time. Intent validation checks that an agent’s proposed action aligns with the user’s or enterprise’s stated objectives. Policy and compliance monitoring evaluates the action against the relying party’s rules on an ongoing basis rather than only at onboarding. Independent auditor agents provide neutral verification, and transaction-level trust attestations are produced that acquirers and networks can ingest for authorization, fraud scoring, and auditability. Fime positions the neutrality of the layer, sitting outside any single payment network or technology platform, as the attribute that makes it interoperable across ecosystems that would otherwise fragment into platform-specific trust models.
The launch lands in an active phase of agentic commerce infrastructure building. Mastercard and Google recently launched a verifiable intent signal for AI payments, and World extended its proof-of-human credential into agentic workflows with Okta and Vercel integrations. Fime’s contribution is less a credential than a verification layer, closer in function to an auditing and attestation overlay than to an identity primitive.
Chief executive officer Lionel Grosclaude said agentic commerce is already emerging across payments and digital ecosystems and that the industry has built systems letting AI transact without building systems that let relying parties trust those transactions at scale. He added that Fime is engaging with ecosystem participants and will share pilot updates in the near term, though the company did not identify specific bank, network, or merchant pilot partners at launch.
The framework draws on Fime’s existing certification and interoperability work, including its EMEA lab’s recent EMVCo recognition for biometric payment card sensor testing. Fime operates with more than 900 consultants and engineers globally, including the Consult Hyperion advisory arm. FACT is the company’s first standalone product line targeting AI-driven commerce rather than conventional payment or identity certification workflows.
Sources: Fime
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
