Open Banking Was Built for the Wrong Future — and That's Why It's Perfect for AI Agents

Visa announced infrastructure for AI agents to make payments without asking you first. GoCardless shipped an MCP server in February so developers can talk to their payment platform in natural language. I build open banking payment infrastructure for the UK. I've been watching both of these announcements very closely. And I have a counterintuitive take: the payment rail everyone called "too complicated for normal users" might be the only one that actually works for AI agents. The Problem With Cards and AI Agents When an AI agent needs to make a payment on your behalf, the obvious infrastructure is what already exists. Cards. Stored credentials. The same rails your Netflix subscription uses. Here's the problem. Card authorisation is broad. When you give Stripe a card token, you're essentially giving that token permission to charge whatever you've authorised — subject to 3DS, fraud rules, and limits. But the authorisation scope isn't bound to a specific action. For an AI agent, that's dan