Payments Technology Community | Merchant Advisory Group

Building relationships within the tech community

The MAG offers the payments tech community an opportunity for ongoing networking, learning, and engagement through participation in MAG committees, communities, webinars, and in-person events. Discuss shared challenges such as modernizing payments platforms, optimizing payments processes, combating fraud, and increasing data security. The technology community brings together viewpoints across the top merchants in the country, leading technology providers, and industry experts.

View Tech Sponsors

Events

Adopting and Implementing Payment Account Reference (PAR)

Payment Account Reference (PAR) is a unique identifier, a 29-character non-financial reference value, associated with the primary account number (PAN)...

More Info

Allies and Partnerships

The MAG engages with several organizations that develop, maintain, and influence the standards and specifications that underpin the payments ecosystem. Once published, how they are implemented by different payments stakeholders can have a profound impact on the operations and the regulatory and network compliance of merchants. In this section, we highlight topics that may be of significant interest to merchants.

CURRENT UPDATES

W3C: An international public-interest non-profit organization that develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web-based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security. FIDO: An open industry association with a focused mission: reduce the world’s reliance on passwords.

The W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard was developed in coordination with the FIDO Alliance and is a core component of the FIDO2 Project along with FIDO’s Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP specification).

W3C and GS1 (https://www.gs1.org) hosted a workshop on "ECommerce for Humans and AI Agents" in September 2026. The MAG presented a Position Statement on “Merchant Perspectives on E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents”, which is available on the MLC. Several of the participants, who were primarily solution providers, expressed the value of having a better understanding of merchant concerns.
W3C hosted a virtual session to provide updates from EMVCo and the FIDO Alliance on their digital credential initiatives. EMVCo shared that they have decided to take the lead in developing the schema for card payment digital credential, initially for authentication use case and exploring payment initiation. FIDO stressed that the EMVCo and FIDO Alliance initiatives are schema definition companions in the broader Digital Payment Credential effort.

X9: An open body that develops and maintains voluntary consensus standards for the U.S. financial services industry. ISO: A network of national standards bodies that develops and publishes international standards on everything from screw threads to quantum key distribution.

X9 represents the United States on two ISO technical committees related to financial services and their subcommittees.

The fall Consensus and Board of Directors meetings will be held October 27-28.
Released an informative report on ‘EBT Chip Card Implementation Guidance’ which can be found on the X9 Informative Reports page. The guidance can assist merchants in implementing support for SNAP chip cards.

USPF: A cross-industry body that enables open exchange of expertise and information to solve problems and help realize innovations that make payments more efficient, simple, and secure. IAF: A cross-industry body dedicated to the development, advancement, and adoption of secure identity technologies, including physical and logical access. ATCF: A cross-industry body focused on building trust, interoperability and governance for the emerging world of AI-driven transactions

These organizations operate within the Secure Technology Alliance, an association that encompasses all aspects of secure digital technologies.

The Secure Technology Alliance launched an Agentic Trust and Commerce Forum (ATCF) to shape the future of AI-driven transactions. The MAG is partnering with the new forum to guide the payments industry toward adopting secure-by-design and interoperable agentic commerce experiences.
The first ATCF project is to review the EMVCo Agentic Framework, provide constructive industry feedback, and inform its continued development.
The fall USPF Member Meeting will be held on November 17-18.
The USPF posted the first two LinkedIn articles of an eight-part series based on the previously published Agentic Commerce: A Primer for the Payments Industry whitepaper: What is Agentic Commerce? And Know Your Agent: Building Trust and Accountability in Agentic Commerce.

A global technical body that creates and manages the EMV® Specifications to enable interoperable and secure card-based payments.

The fall Board of Advisors meeting will be held October 13-14.
An updated version of the Payment Account Reference White Paper (v2.2) was published in August. The white paper has been restructured and now includes examples of PAR usage.
An updated version of the Tokenization Technical Framework FAQ (v2.4) was published in August. The document has been restructured and includes updated content.
The second in a series of position papers on Quantum Computing and EMV Chip Cryptography was published in August.

The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) is a non-profit industry standards body operating in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to unifying the financial services ecosystem around a common, interoperable, and royalty-free technical standard for user-permissioned financial data sharing.

Hosted a webinar on ‘Agentic AI and Open Finance: Risks, Opportunities & Industry Readiness’. A recap of the webinar can be found here.

Events

Tech Forum

The MAG Tech Forum is aligned with the MAG bi-annual conference, offering education and networking opportunities for payments IT professionals. As payments technology evolves, the MAG Tech Forum connects payments technology experts and leading providers to explore innovative applications of these advancements.

The MAG Tech Forum aims to foster collaboration, provide tech-focused knowledge, and build relationships between merchants, their payments IT and business teams, and technology providers.

Tech-focused payment content:

Fintech
IOT payments
Architecture
Blockchain
Analytics
Agile
Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning
Gateways
Data Science
Fraud Mitigation
Biometrics
Orchestration Layers
POS Hardware

Top 5 reasons to attend the Tech Forum

Meet Peers: Connect with IT professionals at the Tech Forum and payments professionals at the MAG conference events representing over 200 of the largest U.S. merchants across physical and digital commerce.

Expand Reach: Create new business connections with Tech Forum and MAG merchant member attendees from every vertical (Digital Goods and Services, Fuel and Convenience, General Retail, Grocery and Restaurant, Mobility and Transportation, Professional Services, Travel and Entertainment).

Join Discussions: In-person event sessions are available on current industry topics that your business peers across the payments community are grappling with. Join the strategic discussions and learn best practices for today’s rapidly changing payments environment.

Gain Insight: Access to industry experts who provide the latest insights and innovative uses of payment technologies twice a year through panel and keynote sessions, as well as within the exhibit halls.

Stay Engaged: Participate in the MAG webinar series, online learning, MAG committees, and Working Groups offered throughout the year. Want to get even more involved? Be a panelist at one of our upcoming events and share your perspective with fellow merchants. To learn more, contact the MAG Events Team.

Tech Forum Sponsorship

Tech Forum Sponsorship offers the opportunity to network and engage with the top retailers in the country. Conferences and webinar sessions are designed for IT professionals to provide attendees with the latest insights needed to understand and use new and emerging technologies in payments.

The Tech Forum Executive Advisory Council along with the support of Tech Forum sponsors will influence the payments technology topics relevant to the membership and included in these Tech Forum sessions. The sessions will discuss how these payments technologies can play a role in creating a more frictionless payments experience for consumers as well as supporting merchants delivering value added services as part of overall commerce.

Tech Forum Sponsor Benefits

DELIVER

Present content as a Tech Forum speaker. Presenters will be selected among Tech Forum sponsors with preference granted to Contributing Sponsors.

BRAND AWARENESS

Increase brand awareness and visibility with key decision makers through speaking opportunities, conference signage and recognition prior and during event.

VISABILITY

Extend your visibility with a complimentary exhibit booth.

NETWORK

Connect with IT professionals at the Tech Forum and payments professionals at the MAG conference events representing over 150 of the largest U.S. merchants which account for over $3.4 trillion in annual sales across physical & digital commerce.

DEVELOP

Create new business connections with Tech Forum and MAG merchant member attendees from every vertical (eCommerce, Mass Merchant, Petroleum/Convenience Stores and Small Ticket/Restaurant).