Fintech investors put $103.1 billion to work in six months, and KPMG says the next money chases agentic commerce

KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech for the first half of 2026 was back in the news on Monday, carried by ANI at 6:12pm Indian time under a headline about agentic commerce [1]. The report itself has been out since August [2]. Global fintech investment across venture, private equity and mergers rose from $72.2 billion in the second half of 2025 to $103.1 billion in the first half of 2026, on 2,100 deals against 2,500 the half before [2]. Ten deals made $64 billion of that, 62 per cent, led by Global Payments buying Worldpay for $24.3 billion and FIS buying Global Payments’ issuer solutions business for $13.5 billion [2]. The Americas took $86.9 billion and the United States $80.8 billion of it across 933 deals, while EMEA drew $11.3 billion and Asia-Pacific $4.6 billion [2].

The agentic line sits on the predictions page, second of five. KPMG expects the use of AI agents to shop and transact for people and companies to pull money into the work around it, and it names cybersecurity and digital identity management first, so that “such transactions are approved, safeguarded, and well-protected from bad actors,” with payments solutions and infrastructure built for agents after that [2]. The payments section adds the line I read twice: modernised rails will have to coexist with instant payment systems, and it names Pix and UPI, next to stablecoin and tokenisation infrastructure [2]. FintechNews Switzerland ran the same predictions on 2 September, with Natural’s $30 million Series A in July for agent payment infrastructure and Mastercard’s purchase of BVNK in August as its worked examples [3].

Approved is the word doing the work. A scheme that can say which agent, acting for whom, under what limit, is what an operations team asks for before it lets an agent near a settlement account, and it is the piece EMVCo only put out for comment on 1 September, with responses due by the end of the month (the 2 September edition). The money KPMG expects to flow into agent identity is going into that question, not past it.

Mumbai this week

The Global Fintech Fest opens in Mumbai on 8 September and runs to the 11th at the Jio World Centre and Trident BKC, organised by the Payments Council of India, NPCI and the Fintech Convergence Council, with agentic AI first in its theme line [4]. Reuters reported on 1 September, per Inc42, that NPCI is preparing a Unified Agent Protocol to let an AI agent make UPI payments without the user approving each one, built on the existing UPI Circle delegation and Reserve Pay features, and that NPCI has already shown a pilot [5]. No cap, limit or launch date has been printed anywhere I can find. If the protocol lands on a stage this week, KPMG’s sentence about UPI and agent infrastructure coexisting gets a worked example within a month of the report.

A quiet weekend

Nothing else in agentic commerce or AI payments cleared this desk’s two-source bar between Saturday and Monday morning. The items in circulation were re-reports of stories this brief already carried: the 21-bank dollar stablecoin from 1 September, Swift’s shared-ledger payment for Siemens from 4 September and the Pix to TIPS study from Saturday. On the rulebook, the Comptroller of the Currency, Jonathan Gould, has said he wants final GENIUS Act rules out by November so applications can be processed in the new year, per PYMNTS on 20 August [6].

Ten deals made $64 billion of KPMG’s $103.1 billion, and the biggest was a payments processor changing hands. Agentic commerce is on the prediction page.