Under the agreement, Fiserv will integrate Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework into its merchant acceptance infrastructure, enabling AI-initiated purchases to be authenticated, tokenized and settled through existing card network rails at a time when autonomous agents are beginning to move from experimentation into live commerce environments.
The announcement reflects a growing effort by processors and networks to adapt payment systems built for human interaction to a model in which software increasingly executes transactions. While agent-driven commerce remains nascent, Fiserv and Mastercard are positioning their infrastructure as a control layer that determines how, and under what conditions, those transactions can occur.
Bringing AI Agents Into the Existing Payments Stack
At the center of the partnership is Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework, a set of technical and governance standards designed to allow artificial intelligence agents to transact within established card payment systems. The framework combines network tokenization, authentication and fraud controls to validate AI-initiated transactions without exposing sensitive card credentials.
Fiserv will integrate Mastercard’s Secure Card on File technology and act as a network token requestor for merchants. Tokenization replaces card numbers with network-issued tokens, allowing transactions to be processed while reducing the risk associated with storing or transmitting raw payment data. In the agentic commerce context, tokenization enables AI systems to execute purchases without direct access to underlying credentials.
The framework also includes authentication mechanisms intended to distinguish authorized AI agents from malicious automation. Rather than relying solely on human-centric signals such as passwords or one-time codes, the system evaluates whether an AI agent has been approved to act on a user’s behalf and whether the transaction falls within predefined parameters.
Fiserv said the integration allows merchants to accept agent-initiated transactions without building custom logic to manage AI behavior. Transactions initiated by AI agents would move through the same authorization, settlement and reconciliation flows merchants already use, including those embedded in Fiserv’s Clover point-of-sale and eCommerce platforms.
“Fiserv and Mastercard are working together to establish the foundation for secure, intelligent and interoperable agentic commerce experiences,” said Sanjay Saraf, senior vice president and global chief product officer for merchant solutions at Fiserv, in the company’s announcement.
Mastercard said the framework is intended to preserve network-level controls as transaction initiation shifts from people to machines. Chiro Aikat, co-president of Mastercard’s U.S. business, said the approach is designed to reduce friction while maintaining trust for merchants and consumers.
Processors and Networks Move to Define Agentic Standards
The Fiserv-Mastercard partnership follows similar moves across the payments industry as firms attempt to define standards for AI-driven commerce before large technology platforms or marketplaces do so independently. PYMNTS previously reported that Fiserv has also partnered with Visa to support Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, signaling a strategy to enable agentic commerce across multiple card networks rather than backing a single proprietary framework.
Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol focuses on validating agent identity and behavior before checkout, with controls designed to keep humans in the loop for higher-risk transactions. Taken together, the Visa and Mastercard initiatives point to a broader effort by card networks to remain central to authorization and trust as AI systems increasingly act on behalf of consumers.
Fiserv and Mastercard did not disclose timelines for broad merchant rollout or expected transaction volumes tied to agent-initiated payments.
Fiserv’s scale gives it leverage in shaping how these standards are implemented. The company processes a significant share of U.S. debit and credit transactions and provides merchant acquiring, core banking and payment technology to financial institutions and retailers globally. That reach allows it to embed agentic commerce capabilities directly into widely used acceptance infrastructure rather than relying on standalone integrations.
