Mastercard is advancing AI-powered payments through new developer tools, expanded consulting services, and strengthened collaborations across the global technology and finance sectors. These initiatives aim to establish the foundation for secure, smarter shopping experiences utilizing artificial intelligence and intelligent agents, as the company helps define standards for AI in payment processing.
Mastercard is collaborating with AI and commerce leaders, including Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom, to ensure secure and scalable agentic transactions for digital merchants and platforms worldwide. By the upcoming holiday season, all U.
S. Mastercard cardholders will be enabled for the Mastercard Agent Pay program, with a global rollout planned soon after. Citi and U.
S. Bank Mastercard cardholders are anticipated to be among the first to experience AI-enabled shopping as agentic commerce providers and enablers, such as PayOS, become operational.
To accelerate adoption, Mastercard is introducing several new tools. The Agent Toolkit, available on Mastercard Developers, allows AI assistants and agentic tools to seamlessly access and interpret Mastercard’s API documentation. This is achieved through structured, machine-readable content via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, facilitating integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, thereby simplifying API integration in agentic workflows. The MCP complements the Agent2Agent protocol.
Additionally, Agent Sign-Up offers a straightforward method for users of the Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products and services. Insight Tokens provide a secure way for agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard. As agentic commerce evolves, these tokens are designed to enable consumers to receive personalized experiences and information with their consent. Insight Tokens leverage existing Mastercard technology already supported by B2B partners like SAP Concur. Mastercard is also offering Agentic Consulting Services, providing expert support to issuers, acquirers, merchants, and AI enablers for designing and implementing intelligent shopping experiences.
Mastercard is leveraging its experience in developing global, interoperable digital payment standards, including contactless and tokenization, to help define how payments should function in agentic environments. In collaboration with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group, Mastercard and other industry leaders are developing a verifiable credential standard for payments. This standard is intended to confirm payment details such as amount, merchant, and product, ensuring all parties in a transaction have confidence that it was approved by the shopper, establishing a secure and trusted foundation for agentic payments.
Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at Mastercard, stated that “AI-powered payments aren’t just a trend — they’re a transformation.” He added that “Payments must be native to the agentic experience. We’re building the infrastructure for a new generation of intelligent transactions, where consumers and developers can empower AI agents to act on their behalf with trust, transparency and precision.”
Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, emphasized, “We’re working with partners across the ecosystem to build the standards and tools that will define agentic commerce.” He further commented, “We’re committed to enabling a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to scale globally.” Mastercard’s infrastructure and standards are designed to support trusted real-world agentic transactions and are prepared to scale with increased adoption by people and businesses.
