Mastercard is partnering with AI and commerce leaders, including Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom, to enable secure, scalable agentic transactions for digital merchants and platforms worldwide.
The company is advancing AI-driven payments by offering new developer tools, expanding consulting services, and fostering collaborations within the global tech and finance communities.
All U.S. Mastercard cardholders will soon be enrolled in the Mastercard Agent Pay program, with a global rollout planned shortly afterward. Prior to this, Citi and U.S. Bank Mastercard users will have the first opportunity to experience AI-enabled shopping through agentic commerce platforms like PayOS and Firmly, along with services from AI industry players such as Basis Theory.
New Tools to Accelerate Adoption
To help developers and businesses get started quickly, Mastercard is launching several new solutions:
- Agent Toolkit: Available on Mastercard Developers, this toolkit allows AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard’s API documentation efficiently through structured, machine-readable content using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. It facilitates integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, making Mastercard APIs more discoverable and easier to incorporate into agentic workflows. MCP complements the Agent2Agent protocol for seamless communication.
- Agent Sign-Up: A straightforward process for users of the Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products and services.
- Insight Tokens: A secure and governed method for agents to obtain and utilize permissioned insights from Mastercard. As agentic commerce evolves, Insight Tokens will enable consumers to receive more personalized and valuable information, with their consent. These tokens are built on Mastercard’s existing technology, already supported by partners such as SAP Concur.
Agentic Consulting Services
Mastercard is offering expert support to issuers, acquirers, merchants, and AI enablers to design intelligent shopping experiences and expedite deployment.
Shaping Future Payment Standards
Leveraging its expertise in developing global digital payment standards—including contactless and tokenization—Mastercard is helping to define how payments should function within agentic environments. In collaboration with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group, the company is working on a verifiable credential standard for payments. This standard will confirm transaction details like amount, merchant, and product, enhancing trust and security by ensuring that all parties can be confident that payments are authorized by the shopper, paving the way for more secure, seamless, and trusted agentic payments.
Building the Foundation for Agentic Experiences
“AI-powered payments represent a transformation, not just a trend,” said Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s Chief Services Officer. “Payments must be integrated into the agentic experience. We’re creating the infrastructure for next-generation intelligent transactions, enabling consumers and developers to empower AI agents to act on their behalf with trust, transparency, and accuracy.”
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer, added, “We’re collaborating across the ecosystem to develop the standards and tools that will define agentic commerce. Our goal is to enable a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to grow globally.”
Author: shadjavist
Humble gentleman who never believes in impossibility
