As agentic commerce continues to evolve, the technology that makes payments work in the resulting transactions continues to adapt as well, including from global payment network owners Visa and Mastercard.
Both companies announced solutions in 2025, signaling that they cared about whether or not artificial intelligence (AI) agent-driven transactions would take place on their networks. Now, AI is powering agents that research, shop and check out for human customers. In turn, new needs have emerged. And in recent months, these payments giants have kept moving forward.
Their approaches underscore key common concerns, as well as what their first moves have been into the agentic commerce ecosystem.
What Visa and Mastercard want to do in agentic commerce
For starters, Visa and Mastercard have pursued important partners within the payments world to ensure that agentic commerce transactions can take place using their networks. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company projects that AI agents could be responsible for $1 trillion in U.S.-based transactions alone by 2030, enticing companies with payments technology and services to establish footholds while systems are being built.
Stripe is one important example of the partners they are seeking out. When Stripe announced it would expand support for network-led agentic payment capabilities with its Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) in March, both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay were among those who were named, along with buy now, pay later (BNPL) services Affirm and Klarna.
When Google announced its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January, Visa and Mastercard were there as well. Meanwhile, Visa has its own Trusted Agent Protocol. Previously, it announced the protocol would align to work with OpenAIâs own Agentic Commerce Protocol. In other contexts, Visaâs other notable collaborators have included Akamai Technologies and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The opportunity that Visa and Mastercard see
These payments rivals seem to agree that agentic commerce is a space where they need to be involved. In the meantime, they also see concerns to be addressed.
âI havenât seen anything like this since the dawn of ecommerce itself in the late â90s or early 2000s,â Jack Forestell, the chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum in New York in March.
With Akamai, Visa wants to address identity verification, authentication and fraud prevention.
âThe agent needs an identity,â Forestell noted. âYou need to secure that identity, you need to validate it, you need to collect more data in order to be able to ensure the security â all that stuff.â
Authentication needs
Elsewhere, Mastercard has also been working on authentication standards for autonomous transactions, teaming with OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare. Cloudflareâs Web Bot Auth technology was developed with Microsoft, Shopify, Checkout.com, Worldpay, Adyen and other companies. Now, it is used by Visa and Mastercard alike.
Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach told analysts in October 2025 that its âfirst agentic transaction took placeâ on Mastercardâs network during that quarter.
He declared that Mastercard would be âat the centerâ of agentic commerce in the future. Moreover, he said that Ethocaâs real-time dispute data and Mastercard Threat Intelligence would help to address security and fraud prevention needs in Mastercardâs Agent Pay program.
At the end of the day, these problems resemble early moves made into ecommerce as retailersâ websites began accepting credit cards and needed to reassure shoppers that their credit card information was in safe hands. With the advent of agentic commerce, it is hard to ignore that this quest is playing out once again. Accordingly, Visa and Mastercard are sizing up potential windfalls that could be at stake.
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