Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology

Mastercard has debuted Agent Pay, an AI-driven payments programme that enables artificial intelligence agents to securely shop and make payments on behalf of consumers.

The technology allows AI agents, the autonomous software systems that can execute tasks on behalf of users, to interact with Mastercard's payment network to search for products, compare prices, and complete purchases. Agent Pay provides the secure payment infrastructure that enables AI agents to handle financial transactions while maintaining the authentication and fraud prevention standards of the Mastercard network.

The launch addresses an emerging challenge in the payments industry: as AI agents become more capable of acting autonomously on behalf of consumers, the payment infrastructure needs to evolve to support transactions initiated by software rather than humans. Agent Pay establishes the protocols and security frameworks for this new interaction model.

Mastercard said Agent Pay integrates with the tokenisation and biometric authentication technologies that underpin its existing payment security architecture. AI agents are authenticated through the same security standards applied to human-initiated transactions, ensuring that agentic payments maintain the same level of consumer protection.

The programme is designed to work with AI agents built by technology companies, retailers, and financial institutions, providing a standardised payment layer that any agent can use to complete commercial transactions. This interoperability is essential for the agentic commerce ecosystem to develop at scale.

Agent Pay positions Mastercard at the forefront of the emerging agentic payments category, where AI systems handle an increasing share of commercial activity on behalf of consumers.