The payments system has always been built around human-to-human interaction, whether for personal exchanges or on behalf of businesses. Account numbers, card numbers, payment portals, etc are all designed to be usable and traceable back to a person existing within the financial system.
This works well today when humans are the dominant actor, but as the world transitions into an agentic future - where agents are responsible for a majority of global transaction volume, we’ll need to create a new way for agents to interact - with consumers, businesses, and increasingly other agents.
Agent-led payments introduces many new questions: what type of accounts do they transact against? Who’s liable for disputes on payments initiated by an agent? What’s the card auth loop equivalent for decision making? How do you keep the system low-latency so that payments can be a required step in API execution?
Today agentic payments make up a payment volume that quickly rounds down to zero in the financial system. But like the transition from in-person to online payments that Stripe pioneered in 2010, the companies building agentic products today, will over the next decade own a meaningful portion of all payment volume globally.
These companies need better payments infrastructure built around their workflows to support the new problems and opportunities that arise in an agentic world. Right now, there is an opportunity to re-invent the financial system to be faster, cheaper, and more global for these agent-led companies.
That’s why we’re starting Natural.
Kahlil Lalji
CEO & Co-founder