AI-Powered Payments Revolution: Mastercard and Ant Group Lead the Charge

Citi and US Bank customers get first access to Mastercard Agent Pay

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. Unveiled in April, Mastercard Agent Pay is the firm's bid to tap into the potentially hugely lucrative agentic payments arena. Citi and US Bank Mastercard cardholders will be the first to have the opportunity to experience AI-enabled shopping, with all of the card giant's US users added by the holiday season and a global rollout set to follow. Explaining the technology earlier this year, Mastercard used the example of someone planning a birthday party who chats with an AI agent to curate a selection of outfits and accessories from local boutiques and online retailers based on their style, the venue's ambience, and weather forecasts. Based on her preferences and feedback, the agent can make the purchase, and also recommend the best way to pay. Separately, Mastercard has launched an Agent Toolkit to help AI assistants and agentic tools access and interpret Mastercard's API documentation. "AI-powered payments aren't just a trend -- they're a transformation," says Craig Vosburg, chief services officer, Mastercard. "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."

Ant unit debuts agentic AI payments tech

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. Merchant payments and digitisation services provider Antom is working with Mastercard and Visa to pilot card-based transaction capabilities for AI agents. In addition it is also connecting AI agents to a range of alternative payment methods (APMs), including digital wallets. The technology supports embedded payment flows through dialogue-based interactions with AI agents, covering both confirmed purchase requests and conditional, pre-authorised transactions, such as purchases within a predefined spending limit or scheduled flash sales. Antom says its AI-ready payment mandate model and enhanced asset management ensures precise recognition of user intent while safeguarding transaction security and providing increased transparency for users. Gary Liu, GM, Antom, says: "The rise of agentic payment calls for rethinking how payment systems are designed. We look forward to co-building the protocols and frameworks with partners across the financial, tech and commerce sectors to ensure agentic payments are smooth and reliable."

Mastercard Introduces Tools to Facilitate AI-Powered Payments and Agentic Transactions | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. "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," Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at Mastercard, said in a Wednesday (Sept. 10) press release. One of the new tools, the Agent Toolkit, supports integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot by enabling AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard's API documentation using structured, machine-readable content via the Model Context Protocol server, according to the release. The other new tools include Agent Sign-Up, which enables users of Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products and services; Insight Tokens, which allow agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard to provide more personalized and useful experiences; and Agentic Consulting Services, which help issuers, acquirers, merchants and AI enablers design intelligent shopping experiences, the release said. In addition, Mastercard is working with the FIDO Alliance's Payments Working Group and other industry leaders to develop a verifiable credential standard for payments in agentic commerce that ensures everyone involved in a transaction can be confident that it was approved by the shopper, per the release. "We're committed to enabling a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to scale globally," Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said in the release. Mastercard also said in the release that the Mastercard Agent Pay program will be enabled for all U.S. Mastercard holders by the holiday season and will be rolled out globally shortly after that. The company debuted Agent Pay, its agentic AI-driven payments program, in April together with Agentic Tokens, which it said builds upon tokenization capabilities that power global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments, along with programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions. "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," the company said at the time in a press release. During a July earnings call, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach told investors that agentic AI is already helping enterprises manage payments. "We are driving innovation across the stack -- from enabling seamless interoperability to embedding AI for greater contextual reference," Miebach said.

Ant's Antom Debuts Agentic Payment Solution | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The new offering, announced Thursday (Sept. 4), features what the company calls a "first-of-its-kind" secure alternative payment method (APM) checkout solution, and makes Antom among the first Visa and Mastercard partners to pilot card-based transaction capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. "In a commercial setting, one of the most critical capabilities for AI agents is to complete payments flexibly and reliably to meet user expectations," the company said in a news release. "Antom's agentic payment solution is expected to meet this need with broad payment method coverage, offering convenient checkout through APMs and cards." According to the release, the solution is built upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and supports embedded payment flows through "dialogue-based interactions" with AI agents, covering both confirmed purchase requests and conditional, pre-authorized transactions, such as purchases within a preset spending limit or scheduled flash sales. The release also notes that Antom is one of the first partners to work with Mastercard via Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa through Visa Intelligent Commerce in the Asia Pacific region to explore tokenized card-based agentic payments. "They will pilot reliable and personalized agentic payments with tokenization, authentication and transaction control tools," the company said. As PYMNTS noted last month, the MCP is part of the new stack for intelligent commerce, with Visa and other companies using it for intelligent commerce, allowing AI agents to interact with payments and other tools to autonomously and securely carry out tasks. "The goal is to extend the trust of the Visa brand into the future of agentic commerce," Visa Senior Vice President and Global Head of Growth Rubail Birwadker said in an interview with PYMNTS published Thursday. "An MCP layer removes friction for developers and drives standardization at scale." Visa had just announced it was opening access to its MPC server so developers can plug AI agents directly into Visa Intelligent Commerce application programming interfaces (APIs). After testing MPC in-house and with partners since launching Visa Intelligent Commerce in the spring, the company now wants to "extend the edges of our network to make it even easier for agents and other companies to build on," Birwadker said. He added that he expects access layers like MCP to become "a relatively important tool," as websites today or even developer docs "were not really designed with agents in mind."