Klarna has announced that it is joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard developed to enable artificial intelligence agents, merchant systems, and payment providers to work together across the full digital shopping lifecycle. UCP is designed to create interoperability between autonomous AI assistants and core retail and payment systems, supporting everything from product discovery to purchase and post-purchase services.
By signing on to the Universal Commerce Protocol, the Swedish fintech and flexible payments provider is positioning itself as a key infrastructure partner in the emerging agentic commerce sector, where autonomous AI assistants are expected to handle most aspects of the shopping experience. This move builds on a multiyear relationship between Klarna and Google that already includes integration with Google Pay, the Google Store, Google Play, and Google Cloud infrastructure.
“As AI-driven shopping continues to evolve, it’s important that the underlying commerce infrastructure is built on openness, trust and transparency,” wrote David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna, in the press release announcing the UCP support.
The Universal Commerce Protocol aims to establish a common technical language that allows AI agents, merchant platforms and payment systems to interact seamlessly across different AI platforms. By participating in UCP, Klarna intends to make its flexible payment options and real-time decisioning systems accessible within AI-driven commerce interactions, enhancing the overall shopping experience for consumers and developers alike.
Klarna’s support for UCP follows its earlier adoption of Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a separate open standard focused specifically on securely executing payments initiated by AI agents. Together, these standards aim to reduce complexity and technical barriers for merchants and payment providers as they integrate AI-powered shopping and checkout experiences into their systems.
The rollout of UCP is part of a broader industry effort to create the infrastructure necessary for autonomous commerce. When Google launched the protocol, it did so with backing from a coalition of major retailers and payment networks, including Shopify, Target, Walmart, Visa and Mastercard. UCP is intended to support new checkout capabilities within Google’s AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, enabling users to complete purchases during AI-assisted browsing without navigating away to external sites.
With both UCP and AP2 in its ecosystem, Klarna is helping advance an open and interoperable commerce framework where trusted payment solutions can work seamlessly across AI-powered shopping experiences. Ashish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Merchant Shopping at Google, said that “open standards like UCP are essential to making AI-powered commerce practical at scale,” and that Klarna’s participation reflects the cross-industry collaboration needed to build secure, interoperable commerce experiences that offer choice while maintaining safety.
Klarna’s integration into these open-standard protocols comes at a time when companies across the retail and fintech landscape are adapting to the shift toward AI-assisted commerce, with major players adjusting their systems to support more seamless, secure and scalable online transactions as consumer behavior evolves.
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