Mastercard is accelerating its entry into the next frontier of digital commerce by launching a comprehensive suite of tools and partnerships aimed at making secure, AI-driven agentic transactions scalable and accessible worldwide. In a significant move to shape the future of automated payments, the company has partnered with leading innovators including Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom to empower developers, merchants, and platforms with the infrastructure needed to support intelligent agents that can shop, pay, and transact on behalf of consumers.
At the core of this initiative is the expansion of the Mastercard Agent Pay program, which will now be enabled for all U.S.-issued Mastercard cardholders, with a global rollout set to follow. Initially, customers of Citi and U.S. Bank will gain early access to AI-enhanced shopping experiences through emerging agentic commerce providers such as PayOS, Firmly, AI, and Basis Theory—platforms now integrating Mastercard’s new developer tools to enable seamless, consent-based transactions driven by artificial intelligence.
To accelerate adoption, Mastercard has introduced several foundational resources. The Agent Toolkit, now available on Mastercard Developers, allows AI assistants and agentic systems to interpret and integrate with Mastercard’s APIs using structured, machine-readable data via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server—a critical advancement for enabling interoperability between AI agents. Compatible with platforms like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, the toolkit simplifies API discovery and integration within agentic workflows, complementing emerging protocols like Agent2Agent.
Alongside it, the Agent Sign-Up process offers a streamlined way for developers to register their AI agents and gain access to Mastercard’s AI-enabled products and services. To enhance personalization while preserving privacy, Mastercard is also rolling out Insight Tokens—a secure, governed method for agents to access permissioned consumer insights. Built on existing Mastercard technology and already adopted by B2B partners like SAP Concur, Insight Tokens allow users to benefit from tailored recommendations and transactional intelligence—all with explicit user consent.
For financial institutions and tech enablers navigating this shift, Mastercard is offering Agentic Consulting Services, providing expert guidance to issuers, acquirers, merchants, and AI platforms on designing trusted, intelligent shopping experiences and bringing them to market faster.
Crucially, Mastercard is not just building tools—it’s helping define the rules. Drawing on its legacy of shaping global payment standards such as contactless and tokenization, the company is working with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group to develop a verifiable credential standard for agentic environments. This framework will cryptographically confirm essential transaction details—such as amount, merchant, and product—ensuring that both consumers and merchants have confidence that an AI-driven payment was authorized by the account holder. This effort lays the groundwork for a more secure, transparent, and interoperable ecosystem where trust is embedded into every automated interaction.
“AI-powered payments are not just a trend—they’re a transformation,” said Craig Vosburg, Chief Services Officer at Mastercard. “Payments must be intrinsic to the agentic experience. We are creating 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, added, “We are collaborating with partners across the ecosystem to establish the standards and tools that will define agentic commerce. We are committed to enabling a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to scale globally.”
As artificial intelligence reshapes how people interact with digital services, Mastercard AI agentic payments represent a strategic pivot toward a world where autonomous systems handle routine purchasing tasks—from reordering household essentials to booking travel—with speed, security, and user control. By combining open development tools, robust privacy safeguards, and cross-industry collaboration, Mastercard is positioning itself not just as a facilitator of transactions, but as a foundational architect of the next era of commerce.
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