Mastercard has introduced new tools to help developers and businesses get ready for artificial intelligence-powered payments and agentic transactions ahead of the global launch of the Mastercard Agent Pay program.
“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,” Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at Mastercard, said in a Wednesday (Sept. 10) press release.
One of the new tools, the Agent Toolkit, supports integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot by enabling AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard’s API documentation using structured, machine-readable content via the Model Context Protocol server, according to the release.
The other new tools include Agent Sign-Up, which enables users of Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products and services; Insight Tokens, which allow agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard to provide more personalized and useful experiences; and Agentic Consulting Services, which help issuers, acquirers, merchants and AI enablers design intelligent shopping experiences, the release said.
In addition, Mastercard is working with the FIDO Alliance’s Payments Working Group and other industry leaders to develop a verifiable credential standard for payments in agentic commerce that ensures everyone involved in a transaction can be confident that it was approved by the shopper, per the release.
“We’re committed to enabling a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to scale globally,” Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said in the release.
Mastercard also said in the release that the Mastercard Agent Pay program will be enabled for all U.S. Mastercard holders by the holiday season and will be rolled out globally shortly after that.
The company debuted Agent Pay, its agentic AI-driven payments program, in April together with Agentic Tokens, which it said builds upon tokenization capabilities that power global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments, along with programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions.
“Mastercard Agent Pay will enhance generative AI conversations for people and businesses alike by integrating trusted, seamless payments experiences into the tailored recommendations and insights already provided on conversational platforms,” the company said at the time in a press release.
During a July earnings call, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach told investors that agentic AI is already helping enterprises manage payments.
“We are driving innovation across the stack — from enabling seamless interoperability to embedding AI for greater contextual reference,” Miebach said.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/