Imprint lands Kroger for co-branded credit card as agentic commerce threatens interchange economics

Imprint lands Kroger as agentic commerce puts interchange in the crosshairs

Imprint, the co-branded credit card and payments infrastructure company, has signed Kroger — the fourth-largest merchant in the US — to launch or relaunch its co-branded credit card. Kroger is leaving a major bank that has held the relationship for roughly a century, choosing Imprint instead. It follows Shell departing Citi for Imprint, and Crate & Barrel leaving another large bank.

“They're leaving a big bank — a bank that's been around for a hundred years — choosing us. It's obviously a big vote for us because they're the fourth largest merchant in the US... Crypto was a fugazi year. Like, this is actually the first time I think interchange is in danger. And it's 2% of American commerce goes across these rails. So it's a huge amount of value.”

Why merchants are switching

Murphy says incumbents lose on two fronts. First, the big banks use co-branded relationships to cross-sell mortgages, deposit accounts, and other products, effectively redirecting the merchant's customer toward the bank's own balance sheet. Second, every major bank credit card runs on legacy mainframe infrastructure. Imprint spent $100 million rebuilding its tech platform from scratch, which Murphy says lets it ship better product than its bank competitors.

The co-branded card economics work roughly like this: Visa and Mastercard take around 15-16 basis points on each transaction. The card issuer — Imprint, Chase, or whoever's name is on the card — earns about $1.80 to 2% in interchange. Imprint gives nearly all of that back to the brand as consumer rewards. Imprint then takes a profit share with its partner bank off the bottom. Imprint itself is not a bank and holds no charter, working instead with partner banks, similar to how Affirm and Klarna operate.

Agentic commerce and the interchange threat

The more forward-looking argument Murphy makes is that co-branded cards, however well-designed, may be a transitional product. Imprint has been building infrastructure to let merchants accept direct bank account payments, which cost only basis points rather than the ~2% interchange rate. The friction historically blocking that shift — consumers having to manually link bank accounts — could dissolve in an agentic world where a personal AI agent handles account linking on the user's behalf.

Murphy is direct about the implication: "This is actually the first time I think interchange is in danger." He estimates interchange touches 2% of all American commerce, making it a substantial pool of value. Stripe is already pushing in this direction through its Link product, which Murphy says is prompting Uber users to pay via linked bank accounts instead of cards.

The merchants who are betting on co-branded cards today are largely doing so to stay top-of-wallet as AI agents and platforms like Instacart encroach on the direct customer relationship. The card keeps the brand embedded in consumer spending behavior. Whether that remains the best mechanism once agents can route payments directly through bank rails is the open question Imprint is positioning itself to answer either way.