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Deployment record
In the tracker →- Organisation
- Mastercard
- System
- Agent Pay
- Stage
- Announced
- Function
- payments
- Built on
- OpenAI
- 01Mastercard has entered a strategic partnership with OpenAI to enhance its payment solutions, including the use of Agent Pay for AI agents.
- 02CEO Michael Miebach described agentic commerce as an evolving sector that includes machine-to-machine transactions and traditional e-commerce, with significant growth expected during holiday shopping.
- 03Mastercard's Agent Pay incorporates tokenization for secure transactions, while additional products like Verifiable Intent and Agentic Trust Intelligence support the agentic commerce ecosystem.
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- 04The company does not support one-time virtual card numbers, favoring full tokenization through Agent Pay instead.
- 05Mastercard reported Q3 2026 net revenue of $9.8 billion, a 14% increase on a currency-neutral basis, and adjusted diluted EPS of $5.31, up 21%.
Mastercard
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Mastercard has signed a broad strategic partnership with OpenAI. CEO Michael Miebach said on the company's Q3 2026 earnings call on October 29, 2026 that the agreement includes the use of Agent Pay, Mastercard's payment product for AI agents, and goes well beyond it, covering payments, joint growth in services, and AI transformation.
Miebach described agentic commerce, in which buyers use AI agents to find, choose and buy, as "the next evolution of digital commerce."
He said it takes two forms, machine-to-machine transactions and traditional e-commerce, and pointed to B2B card payments and micro-transactions as future opportunities.
Adoption is at an early stage. "It is still early days, and the numbers are not yet significant in the grand scheme," Miebach said. He added that agentic transactions are ramping up at impressive weekly growth rates, and that he expects holiday shopping to accelerate adoption.
Four Requirements and the Products Behind Them
Miebach said agentic commerce needs four things to work: trust in the payment, trust in the agent, trust in the ecosystem, and reach across merchants. Mastercard has built a product for each.
Agent Pay has tokenization embedded in it, and verifies that agents are authorized by the buyer, with both merchants and issuers aware of the transaction. Verifiable Intent captures what the buyer intended within the payment flow.
Agentic Trust Intelligence, launched recently, helps banks and merchants evaluate transactions initiated by any AI agent. Agent Connect helps merchants become discoverable to agents.
Shopify is one of the first large deployments. Miebach said Shop Pay uses Agent Pay and network tokens to keep payment credentials secure from end to end, and that it is available on multiple agentic platforms, with more to follow.
Tokens, Not Virtual Cards
In response to a question from Bernstein analyst Harshita Rawat, Miebach said the agentic ecosystem is currently a "patchwork," and that the industry has spent more than a year preparing for it.
He said Mastercard does not support one-time virtual card numbers as a solution, and that full tokenization through Agent Pay or an equivalent is the approach it is backing.
The week's banking, insurance and brokerage deployments. Tuesdays.
Asked by Evercore's Adam Frisch to clarify, Miebach described a virtual card number as a processor decision that serves as a bridge toward a fully tokenized transaction, and said Mastercard is not supporting it as a solution in between.
On merchant readiness, Miebach told UBS analyst Timothy Chiodo that merchants range from small businesses still going digital to large retailers building their own agents.
He said payment service providers, software vendors and processors are critical partners, and that Agent Pay and Agent Connect are designed to give merchants one interface rather than a separate solution for each partner.
CFO Ling Hai said Mastercard is using MDES, its tokenization platform, to enhance its token for agentic commerce, and that new agentic use cases create room for pricing. She said agentic commerce will not be the only way people shop. "It is going to be multimodal," she said.
AI and Security
Miebach said AI is changing both how commerce happens and the demand for Mastercard's security products, which cover fraud, identity and cybersecurity.
He described AI as a tool in the hands of fraudsters and scammers. "AI will create more vulnerabilities," Hai said, adding that Mastercard will need to build solutions to address them.
Digital Risk Protection, which helps organizations find vulnerabilities in their digital environments, now serves nearly 800 enterprise customers after a few months in market.
Mastercard has also combined capabilities from RiskRecon and Recorded Future into a third-party risk offering, and Miebach said the Recorded Future investment was made with threat intelligence in mind.
The company announced fraud and identity wins with Standard Bank, Monzo and Starling Bank. Miebach said he does not expect a sudden jump in security growth.
He also said AI is driving productivity gains inside Mastercard and fueling new products, without giving figures.
Mastercard reported Q3 2026 net revenue of $9.8 billion, up 14% on a currency-neutral basis, and adjusted diluted EPS of $5.31, up 21%. Value-added services and solutions revenue grew 19%, driven by business and marketing insights, security solutions, and digital and authentication.
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