Mastercard Debuts Agent Pay to Promote ‘Agentic Commerce Future’

Mastercard has launched Agent Pay, its agentic artificial intelligence (AI)-driven payments program.

The new offering, announced Tuesday (April 29), introduces Mastercard’s Agentic Tokens, which the company said builds upon tokenization capabilities that power global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments, along with programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions.

“This helps unlock an agentic commerce future where consumers and businesses can transact with trust, security, and control,” the company said in a news release. “Mastercard Agent Pay will enhance generative AI conversations for people and businesses alike by integrating trusted, seamless payments experiences into the tailored recommendations and insights already provided on conversational platforms.”

That means, the company said, that someone planning a party could chat with an AI agent to curate outfits and accessories or plan a venue. The agent can then make purchases based on that customer’s preferences and feedback, while also recommending the best way to pay.

According to the release, Mastercard plans to collaborate with a number of tech companies on the program: Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, IBM to accelerate B2B use cases and companies like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance tokenization capabilities already in use.

“The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer.

“Recognizing the seismic implications of this evolution, we are keen to collaborate with industry players to advance the standards for agentic payments, such as applying the Model Context Protocol to Secure Remote Commerce,” he added. “This lays the foundation for scale and builds trust in agentic commerce.”

In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS explored the technology’s use in things like loan underwriting, fraud detection and cross-border payments in a recent interview with TerraPay Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram.

He noted that while automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, there’s still a need for have some human interaction.

“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said.

It’s not always easy to immediately determine where a transaction is, as company analysts and representatives have to examine logs and query partner systems.

“A lot of that work is done manually,” Sundaram said, adding that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”