Authoryze is built for agents buying things, and it is shipping and self-serve today. It connects over MCP with no pre-registration, issues a single-use card per approved purchase, enforces per-agent and cross-agent limits and merchant rules server-side, sends anything over the threshold to a person, and gives teams a shared envelope with approvers. Payman put guardrails around a different job. Its developer platform moved money through ACH and USDC wallets with policy-based controls, aimed at B2B workflows like paying contractors and vendors. In 2026 Payman repositioned toward agentic banking for financial institutions and shipped Genie, a consumer-facing MCP agent that submits payments through a linked bank.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Authoryze | Payman |
|---|---|---|
| Payment rails | Single-use cards through the card networks' agentic programs (Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay) | ACH and USDC wallets on the 2025 developer platform; the user's own bank through Genie |
| Primary use case | Agents making card purchases | Payouts to pre-registered payees; now bank-deployed agents for transfers and account services |
| Integration | MCP-native via a single MCP server, OAuth with no pre-registration | Genie remote MCP server with OAuth for registered hosts; legacy TypeScript and Python SDKs, last released in 2025 |
| Spend controls | Per-transaction caps, daily/weekly/monthly limits, merchant allow/blocklists, aggregate caps across agents | Legacy policies with approval threshold, per-transaction, daily, and monthly limits, payee whitelisting; Genie controls still being added |
| Human approval | Built-in approval flow by email and dashboard, with duplicate detection | Legacy platform paused transactions over the threshold until approved |
| Teams | Shared team envelope, approvers, per-member and per-agent records, one monthly plan | Not documented for Genie |
| Crypto | None, card rails only | USDC on the legacy platform |
Cards vs Money Movement
The core difference is what kind of payment each is built for. Authoryze is oriented around an agent buying something at a merchant with a single-use card. The agent requests, the rules engine decides, an approver steps in over the threshold, and the agent gets the card directly from retrieve_card, with no ACH, stablecoins, or bank integration in the picture.
Payman's developer platform was oriented around moving money to people and businesses, with payees registered in advance and policies that set an approval threshold and per-transaction, daily, and monthly limits. Its since-removed security page said USD wallets were held at Stripe with funds at Fifth Third Bank and USDC wallets at Bridge. Payman's docs host is offline and its security and pricing pages return 404 as of September 16, 2026, and its SDKs have not shipped a release in about a year. What it ships today is Genie, a bank-link model rather than agent wallets.
When Authoryze Is the Right Choice
Choose Authoryze if your agents make card purchases and you want it MCP-native with per-agent and cross-agent limits, human approval over thresholds, duplicate-purchase protection, shared team envelopes, and full audit, without ACH, stablecoins, or a bank integration in the picture.
Sources
Payman claims on this page were checked on September 16, 2026 against paymanai.com, its agentic banking page (paymanai.com/agentic-banking), its press page (paymanai.com/press), genie.paymanai.com, the PaymanAI/genie-mcp-stdio repository on GitHub, and Wayback Machine copies of Payman's own docs and security pages where the live pages are gone. If something has changed since, let us know.
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