Mastercard Debuts Merchant Cloud to Bolster Commerce Growth

Mastercard has introduced a payments platform providing its services and those of its partners to merchants.

The company’s Merchant Cloud offers “scheme-agnostic solutions” for credential tokenization, guest checkout, fraud protection, identity verification, and approval rate optimization, Mastercard said in a Tuesday (Oct. 14) news release.

In addition, the company added, the platform offers customers with various gateway services, such as omni-channel experiences, “efficient transaction routing,” and access to data insights.

“Combined with dedicated support and easy onboarding, the platform is designed to simplify the life of every partner to easily access the services they need to grow their businesses safely and securely, in an AI enabled world,” the release said.

According to Mastercard, Merchant Cloud will let merchants conduct agentic payments securely, integrating into the company’s Agent Pay to “provide consumers with a seamless and trusted agentic shopping experience.”

In addition, Merchant Cloud incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline shopping and help improve approval rates.

“Our latest offering, Payment Optimization Platform (POP), uses Mastercard’s network intelligence and will soon use AI to provide optimal authorization messages and deliver insights that drive more approvals,” the company added, referring to a platform introduced this week.

“With Mastercard Merchant Cloud, commerce is truly simplified through a unified, scalable, secure, and open infrastructure — one that not only supports the needs of merchant partners today with data, services and insights, but is also designed to anticipate the future of digital and agent-driven commerce,” added Gaurang Shah, Mastercard’s executive vice president for global acceptance and merchant solutions.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard has explored the troubles merchants deal with when it comes to online checkout.

For example, The Online Merchant Checkout Innovation Report in late 2024 found that six out of every 10 merchants said they’d run into a problem related to elements of user experience in online checkout.

“Smooth checkouts are critical to conversion,” PYMNTS wrote. “Merchants are ready to invest in technologies that improve the user experience, but they need to understand the options available and see past obstacles that deter them.”

In other Mastercard news, PYMNTS spoke last week with Raj Seshadri, the company’s chief commercial payments officer, about the use of AI in business payments.

“There’s a continuous evolution and … dynamic disruption in finance that requires CFOs to harness data and AI to make finance more efficient, more effective and substantially more strategic,” Seshadri said in a discussion for the B2B PYMNTS 2025 event, “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement.”