PURCHASE, N.Y.—Mastercard is introducing a series of artificial intelligence initiatives in payments, including new tools for developers, expanded consulting services, and partnerships with technology and financial firms.
The company said the measures are intended to explore how AI and intelligent agents can be applied to payment security and transaction efficiency.
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, the company said.
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 and other industry players go live, the company said.
New Tools To Accelerate Adoption
Separately, to help developers and businesses get started quickly, Mastercard said it is launching:
- Agent Toolkit: Available on Mastercard Developers, the toolkit enables AI assistants and agentic tools to seamlessly access and interpret Mastercard’s API documentation using structured, machine-readable content via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This supports integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot – making Mastercard APIs more discoverable and easier to integrate in agentic workflows. The availability of MCP complements the Agent2Agent protocol.
- Agent Sign-Up: A simple way for those using the Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products and services.
- Insight Tokens: A secure and governed way for agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard. As agentic commerce matures, Insight Tokens will enable consumers to receive, with their consent, more personalized and useful experiences and information. Insight Tokens are built on Mastercard technology that is already supported by B2B partners like SAP Concur.
- Agentic Consulting Services: Expert support to help issuers, acquirers, merchants and AI enablers design intelligent shopping experiences, and get up and running faster.
“AI-powered payments aren’t just a trend — they’re a transformation,” said Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at 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."