Johannesburg: AfricUpdate – News Desk
Mastercard is advancing AI-powered payments with new tools for developers, expanded consulting services and deeper collaboration across the global tech and finance ecosystem. These efforts are laying the foundation for smarter, more secure shopping experiences using artificial intelligence and intelligent agents as the company is helping to set the standards for how AI can securely and confidently handle payments.
Mastercard is working with AI and commerce leaders including Stripe, Google and Ant International’s Antom to make secure agentic transactions accessible and scalable for digital merchants and platforms globally. By the holiday season, all U.S. Mastercard cardholders will be enabled for the Mastercard Agent Pay program, with global rollout to follow shortly thereafter. Ahead of this, Citi and U.S. Bank Mastercard cardholders will be the first to have the opportunity to experience AI-enabled shopping as agentic commerce providers and enablers like PayOS, Firmly.AI, Basis Theory and other industry players go live.
Mastercard is leveraging its expertise in shaping global, interoperable digital payments standards, including contactless and tokenization, to help define how payments should operate in agentic environments. Together with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group, Mastercard and other industry leaders are developing a verifiable credential standard for payments that confirms payment details such as amount, merchant and product.
This ensures that everyone involved in a transaction can experience confidence that it was approved by the shopper, paving the way for a more secure, seamless and trusted foundation for agentic payments. Mastercard’s infrastructure and standards are designed to support trusted real-world agentic transactions today and are ready to scale as more people and businesses adopt them.
