April 25th marked Payman's first birthday. It's been easily the most fun, interesting, never-ending learning experience of my life. Throughout the year we've built strong relationships with some of the biggest payment players in the space (Visa, Stripe, Bridge, Sardine). We've been diving into the AI payments space for what at this point feels like decades in payment years. All throughout this we've been focused on a really important goal. How do we get humans to trust AI with millions of dollars?
This has led us down a journey of banking, crypto, building our own agents, hacking with developers, and working with lots of lawyers to figure out exactly what this means. When we first started over a year ago we really wanted to crack how to get AI to pay humans. That idea was a hit. At least in terms of humans wanting to get paid. To date we have had over 100,000+ people sign up. But there was a really hard part from a developer's viewpoint. How do we actually get the AI secure access to money in order to pay a person? And even more so, what would an AI pay a human for?
The developer's challenge
I've been working with developers for almost a decade now. It was clear to me that giving AI access to money was a big hindrance for developers. The banking partnerships needed, the fraud to worry about, the controls, the legal knowhow on how to spend money. These are all things that are a product in and of itself. When a developer sets out to build a use case for an AI Agent to do anything that's hard enough as is. Pair that with the AI Agent doing something really well, then needing to move money, those are basically two major products the developer needs to build themselves. And how many developers know the intricate ins and outs of moving money (let alone an AI doing it)? Very very few if any.
So when we set out to do this, we thought there was a very clear solution. Give the AI Agents their own wallets/bank accounts and make it easy for them to get access to money. Pretty normal right? Humans have bank accounts and that gives them access to money so that's naturally how Agents would do it too. As we built out a solution and started getting developers to use it we kept running into the same interesting problem.
"I actually don't want my AI Agent to have an account or wallet, I just want it to access others' wallets and accounts."
A new approach
Maybe today agents don't need their own wallets or bank accounts. Maybe developers just need a way for AI Agents to get secure access to money? After all that was what we were looking for when we were building Payman for the first time. But how do you actually allow an AI Agent to access your money securely?
In a future where AI Agents are trading for us, where they are handling treasury management on behalf of an enterprise, and when they are purchasing homes for us, how do you give an AI Agent access to your capital? Even more so technically, how do you as a developer incorporate a solution into the agent you're building that will handle the money side for you? These are all things that kept coming up as we've been working with developers and talking to people over the past year. It's what led us to our biggest product release to date. Two major products.
OAuth for Payman Accounts
Humans need to trust AI Agents with money. Our OAuth solution is built with security and humans in mind when it comes to AI money movement. Dictate your spending policies (including very technical SOPs) around how other AI Agents can spend your money, what documents are required before moving money, how many people need to approve a transaction, what wallets it can access, and which payees it can pay.
Payman's first AI Agent
Now to make the above work, you need an AI Agent you can trust with money. We can't possibly expect developers to also build this when they are so focused on building all the other intricate parts of an AI Agent. That's why we're literally taking the 'P' out of API and introducing our Payman Agent.
Our Payman Agent is a single API call for developers to get the most sophisticated and secure Payment Operations agent in place to handle money movement on behalf of your AI App. Leveraging the A2A protocol and our own MCP we are actually bringing a world where AI Agents are talking to each other in order to get high leverage tasks done.
The promise fulfilled
Opportunity grows exponentially when money is simpler to access. With Payman, there are no complex APIs for money. Just one API you can speak with to handle all the nuanced details of money movement. No more development pain, just total freedom to build the world's most impactful AI Agents. For the first time ever it feels like the promise of an AI Agent economy is starting to be fulfilled.
