Mastercard Launches Agent Pay to Promote ‘Agentic Commerce Future’

Agent Pay, a payments technology powered by agentic artificial intelligence (AI), was introduced by Mastercard.

The new product, which was unveiled on Tuesday, April 29, presents Mastercard’s Agentic Tokens. According to the business, these tokenization capabilities support programmable payments like subscriptions and recurring charges as well as global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments.

“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.”

According to the business, this implies that a person organizing a party may communicate with an AI agent to choose attire and accessories or arrange a location. The agent can then recommend the best method of payment and make purchases based on the customer’s preferences and feedback.

According to the statement, Mastercard intends to work with several tech companies on the program, including IBM to speed up B2B use cases, Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, and companies like Braintree and Checkout.com to improve already-used tokenization capabilities.

Mastercard’s chief product officer, Jorn Lambert, stated, “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.”

“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 pointed out that although automated decision-making and streamlined procedures will continue to revolutionize international money transfers, some human interaction is still necessary.

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

Finding a transaction’s location right away isn’t always simple because analysts and representatives of the organization must look through 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.”