Strivve Extends Top of Wallet to Agentic Commerce — Making the Issuer’s Card the One the AI Agent Uses

As AI assistants begin shopping and paying on consumers’ behalf, Strivve gives every credit and debit card issuer — from the largest banks to community credit unions — the technology to be the default card at agentic checkout: automatically, securely, and across the long tail of merchants where households actually spend.

Strivve, the company behind the patented Top of Wallet® card-on-file platform, announced it is extending its technology to agentic commerce — the fast-emerging world where AI assistants shop and pay on a consumer’s behalf. The move gives any credit or debit card issuer, from the largest banks to the smallest credit unions, a way to become the default card an AI agent reaches for at checkout.

Consumers are beginning to delegate their spending. “Find the best price on headphones under $300 and buy them.” “Reorder the usual groceries and add what we need for taco night.” AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok — can now select the merchant, complete checkout, and pay. That raises the question that will define the next decade of payments: whose card does the agent use?

For issuers, the risk is disintermediation — platforms inserting themselves between the cardholder and the transaction. Strivve’s answer is to make the issuer’s card the one already on file when the agent checks out, present and preferred wherever a consumer’s agent shops, including the thousands of long-tail merchant sites that network-level programs overlook. Strivve calls it Top of Wallet for Agentic Commerce. The prize is as large as the risk: the issuer whose card an agent reaches for by default earns a new stream of agent-initiated transactions across the entire long tail of merchants — automatically, every time the agent shops.

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“For fifteen years, winning top of wallet meant being the card a consumer reached for,” said Chris Hopen, CEO and co-founder of Strivve. “In agentic commerce, the consumer doesn’t reach for anything — the agent does. The issuers who win will be the ones whose card is already there when the agent pays. We make that automatic.”

The capability builds on the same proven, PCI-DSS-compliant placement engine that serves more than 200 credit and debit card issuers today and holds patents purpose-built for autonomous card-on-file placement (U.S. Patents 10,372,980 and 10,846,665). At Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, that platform achieved a 96% card-placement success rate and a 12x return on investment. For agentic commerce, Strivve adds agent-ready placement, so agent-initiated purchases route to the issuer’s card by default; long-tail merchant coverage across the sites where real household spend happens; and per-institution security that keeps credentials under the issuer’s control rather than scattered across agent platforms. Strivve already operates as a verified trusted agent in production today across Cloudflare and Akamai. Its agents implement the Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) — the open, Visa-led framework for verified agent-initiated transactions — so merchants can cryptographically confirm that a Strivve agent is authorized and acting with the cardholder’s consent.

Strivve’s card-on-file platform is available now. Its agentic capability is in early access with a limited group of issuers, backed by a working prototype Strivve will demonstrate against an issuer’s own card portfolio. Issuers can see where their card stands in agentic checkout and start the conversation at strivve.com/agentic.

“Agentic commerce is not a future scenario — it is happening in households right now,” said Kevin Knight, chairperson of Strivve. “Every day an issuer waits, agent-initiated transactions go to whoever moved first. We built this so our issuers never lose that race.”