Ant’s Antom Debuts Agentic Payment Solution

Ant International-owned merchant payment and digitization services provider Antom has launched its agentic payment solution.

The new offering, announced Thursday (Sept. 4), features what the company calls a “first-of-its-kind” secure alternative payment method (APM) checkout solution, and makes Antom among the first Visa and Mastercard partners to pilot card-based transaction capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

“In a commercial setting, one of the most critical capabilities for AI agents is to complete payments flexibly and reliably to meet user expectations,” the company said in a news release.

“Antom’s agentic payment solution is expected to meet this need with broad payment method coverage, offering convenient checkout through APMs and cards.”

According to the release, the solution is built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and supports embedded payment flows through “dialogue-based interactions” with AI agents, covering both confirmed purchase requests and conditional, pre-authorized transactions, such as purchases within a preset spending limit or scheduled flash sales.

The release also notes that Antom is one of the first partners to work with Mastercard via Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa through Visa Intelligent Commerce in the Asia Pacific region to explore tokenized card-based agentic payments.

“They will pilot reliable and personalized agentic payments with tokenization, authentication and transaction control tools,” the company said.

As PYMNTS noted last month, the MCP is part of the new stack for intelligent commerce, with Visa and other companies using it for intelligent commerce, allowing AI agents to interact with payments and other tools to autonomously and securely carry out tasks.

“The goal is to extend the trust of the Visa brand into the future of agentic commerce,” Visa Senior Vice President and Global Head of Growth Rubail Birwadker said in an interview with PYMNTS published Thursday. “An MCP layer removes friction for developers and drives standardization at scale.”

Visa had just announced it was opening access to its MPC server so developers can plug AI agents directly into Visa Intelligent Commerce application programming interfaces (APIs).

After testing MPC in-house and with partners since launching Visa Intelligent Commerce in the spring, the company now wants to “extend the edges of our network to make it even easier for agents and other companies to build on,” Birwadker said.

He added that he expects access layers like MCP to become “a relatively important tool,” as websites today or even developer docs “were not really designed with agents in mind.”

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