Fitting UCP/MCP to Iran's Payment Infrastructure

Global examples of agentic commerce model payment through Stripe or the Visa/Mastercard networks. None of these are normally available in Iran. This page is exactly where the protocol needs to adapt to the reality of the domestic banking network.

Why This Needs Its Own Page

In UCP, the final transaction step ("complete checkout") is designed assuming a payment gateway with a direct, token-based API (like a stored card or an international digital wallet) is available. In Iran, online payment always passes through a different path: Shetab (the interbank settlement network) and Shaparak (the centralized electronic payment switch that every online card transaction in the country passes through). Any checkout design for Iran that ignores this layer is practically unworkable.

A Map of Iran's Payment Infrastructure

• Shetab — the interbank settlement network that routes card-to-card and POS transactions at the central bank level.
• Shaparak — the mandatory, centralized switch for all of the country's online payment gateways; no business in Iran is allowed to accept an online card transaction directly, bypassing Shaparak.
• Licensed PSPs — payment service companies (like ZarinPal, PayPing, IDPay, BehPardakht, and similar) licensed to connect to Shaparak, which provide a payment gateway to businesses.
• No international gateway — due to sanctions, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal play no role in domestic transactions; any payment plan has to be built 100% on domestic infrastructure.

The Core Mismatch: Redirect-Free Checkout vs. Two-Factor Confirmation

The ideal agentic checkout wants a simple, browser-redirect-free API call (the agent sends the amount, the transaction is confirmed server-to-server). But Shaparak's standard flow is based on a redirect to the bank's page and a dynamic/second card code (OTP) — a step that inherently requires the human user's own real-time presence and confirmation on the bank's page, not something an agent could substitute on the user's behalf (and, in fact, shouldn't be able to — this security layer is designed exactly to prevent automatic payment without the cardholder's instant consent).

A Proposed Solution: A Payment Adapter Layer

Instead of trying to bypass two-factor confirmation (which is both insecure and against central bank regulations), the proposal is for agentic checkout in Iran to have a formal, pre-designed "hand-off to human" step:

1. The agent prepares the final cart and confirms the amount with the user (exactly per the Guardrail principle in AI Agents)
2. Instead of calling a payment API directly, the agent generates a Shaparak-based gateway link (through a licensed PSP) for that specific transaction
3. The user themselves enters the second factor/OTP on that link and finalizes the payment — this is the only step deliberately left "non-automated"
4. The agent receives the final result (success/failure) via the PSP's standard callback and completes the order

This model is both familiar to today's Iranian buyer's experience (since they go through this same flow for any other online purchase) and requires no special license or exception from the central bank.

The Data Localization Requirement

Per central bank regulations, Iranian users' card and transaction data must be processed through licensed domestic PSPs and must not leave that path. This means a shopping agent — even if the language model itself runs on cloud infrastructure outside Iran — must never directly see or process card data; the agent's role must stay limited to "generating the gateway link" and "reading the final transaction result," not seeing sensitive payment information midway through the path.

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