Mastercard Pushes Agent Pay Into LatAm’s Digital Boom

Digital commerce in Latin America has reached an inflection point as consumers move almost instinctively between browsing, buying and paying on mobile devices.

Digital payments are displacing cash. For example, Pix, the government-backed real-time payment system developed by the Central Bank of Brazil, processed 64 billion transactions in 2024. Shoppers increasingly expect seamless checkout experiences that work across channels.

Consumers are already using mobile apps to search, compare and transact, creating fertile ground for agentic commerce built around intelligent, automated interactions.

Brazil Shows Digital Readiness

Brazil is an example of how fast consumer behavior has changed. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index: Brazil Edition” found that 61% of Brazilian shoppers used a phone for their latest retail purchase. The Global Digital Shopping Index also showed that 36% of those purchases involved using a phone in store, the highest rate among eight surveyed countries.

Brazilians are also frequent digital window shoppers, researching products 16 days per month on their phones, above the global average.

Digital Payments and the New Standard

Across Latin America, digital payments are now standard. Digital payment methods accounted for 48% of eCommerce transaction value in 2024 and are projected to rise to 66% by 2030, according to PYMNTS Intelligence’s April Embedded Finance Tracker, “Digital Developments: Charting Digital Payment Growth in Latin America.”

That type of on-demand success opens the door for artificial intelligence-supported and automated purchase journeys.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay Debuts in Latin America

This environment supports Mastercard’s push into agentic commerce with Agent Pay. The payments giant said Tuesday (Dec. 3) that it will launch the program in Latin America early next year.

Shoppers already embrace digital behaviors such as storing credentials, comparing prices, seeking loyalty rewards and researching products while in store. The Global Shopping Index revealed that in Brazil, 71% of digital in-store shoppers used their phones to search for savings or apply coupons during their most recent transaction.

Agent Pay aims to automate much of this work in the background through intelligent checkout, tokenization and real-time decisioning.

Tokenization is especially important in Latin America’s digital evolution. Stored credentials reduce friction at checkout, yet 32% of Brazilian consumers still manually enter payment information online, according to the Index.

Issuers Have a Strategic Opportunity

Mastercard brings Agent Pay to a market where nearly 100% of issuers in Latin America are already enabled with the company’s tokenization technology, which means banks and card programs can quickly deploy new agentic experiences. Those issuers have a path to differentiate by improving settlement speed, enabling intuitive saving of credentials and embedding automated installment decisions at checkout.

With digital payments becoming the default, the opportunity for banks is to redesign installment products around flexibility, authorization at checkout and budgeting controls built directly into mobile shopping journeys. An automated system that presents installment options in real time can help consumers better manage spending without added effort.

Merchants, meanwhile, can reduce friction and capture sales. The Global Digital Shopping Index found that 99% of Brazilian consumers reported at least one type of payment-related friction in their latest transaction, with 67% citing processing errors.

Population Scale and Device Usage Strengthen the Case

Latin America’s population adds weight to the agentic commerce opportunity. Mobile internet access reached 418 million Latin Americans in 2023, equal to 65% of the region’s population, according to the Embedded Finance Tracker.

That connected consumer base is increasingly comfortable conducting commerce digitally rather than through traditional channels. In Brazil, shoppers use their phones for digital window shopping an average of 16 days per month, compared to 10.5 days using a computer.

Consumers are researching items, comparing prices and managing payments on mobile devices at higher rates than the global average. The alignment of population scale, device access and digital habits creates conditions that favor agentic payment models.

Issuers and merchants should build toward tokenized, low-friction, AI-driven payments that help consumers discover savings, as well as manage credit and complete purchases in one responsive interaction.