Ant's Antom Pioneers Agentic AI Payment Technology with Visa and Mastercard

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."

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."