APAC AI Payments: HSBC Leads Global Liability Standards

The Emerging Payments Association Asia has launched a new working group with HSBC to define standards for AI agent payments in the Asia Pacific region. This group includes banks, payment networks, fintechs, and technology platforms. AI agents are already making payments for consumers and businesses in the region. HSBC and Mastercard recently piloted B2B agentic commerce transactions, and Alipay's AI Pay processed over 120 million autonomous transactions in one week. Mastercard also completed its first live consumer authenticated agentic payment in APAC. The region is expected to be the fastest-growing market for agentic commerce globally, with a projected growth rate of nearly 45% through 2031. However, there are no agreed standards in APAC for critical issues like liability when an AI agent exceeds its mandate, cross-border identification and authentication of agents, distinguishing legitimate AI transactions from fraud, or resolving disputes for transactions initiated by software. Existing liability regimes often assume human intent, which creates legal ambiguity with autonomous agents. The cost of not addressing these issues is significant. For example, if current fraud reimbursement models were applied to AI agents, payment service providers could face substantial exposure due to the speed and scale of AI-authorized payments. Also, fraud detection systems.