Africa-Press – Botswana. Mastercard is partnering with leading AI and commerce innovators, including Stripe, Google, and Ant International’s Antom, to make secure agentic transactions both accessible and scalable for digital merchants and platforms around the world.
In an effort to advance AI-driven payments, Mastercard is introducing new tools for developers, expanding consulting services, and deepening collaboration with the global tech and finance ecosystem.
As part of this initiative, all U.S. Mastercard cardholders will be enabled for the Mastercard Agent Pay program, with a global rollout to follow shortly after. Initially, Citi and U.S. Bank Mastercard cardholders will have the exclusive opportunity to experience AI-enhanced shopping, as agentic commerce providers and enablers such as PayOS, Firmly, AI, Basis Theory, and other industry players go live.
New tools for accelerating adoption:
To support developers and businesses in quickly getting started, Mastercard is launching:
Agent Toolkit: Available on Mastercard Developers, this toolkit allows 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. It also facilitates integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot—making Mastercard APIs easier to discover and integrate within agentic workflows. The MCP’s availability complements the Agent2Agent protocol.
Agent Sign-Up: A straightforward method for users of the Agent Toolkit to identify their agents and gain access to AI-enabled Mastercard products and services.
Insight Tokens: A secure, governed way for agents to access and apply permissioned insights from Mastercard. As agentic commerce evolves, Insight Tokens will enable consumers to receive more personalized and useful experiences and information, with their consent. Insight Tokens are built on Mastercard’s existing technology and are already supported by B2B partners like SAP Concur.
Agentic Consulting Services: Expert guidance to help issuers, acquirers, merchants, and AI enablers design intelligent shopping experiences and accelerate their implementation.
Establishing industry standards for the future of payments:
Mastercard is leveraging its deep expertise in shaping global, interoperable digital payment standards—including contactless and tokenization—to help define how payments should function in agentic environments. In collaboration with the FIDO Alliance and its Payments Working Group, Mastercard and other industry leaders are developing a verifiable credential standard for payments. This standard will confirm transaction details such as amount, merchant, and product, ensuring that all parties involved in a transaction have confidence that it was approved by the shopper. This lays the groundwork for a more secure, seamless, and trusted foundation for agentic payments.
Building the foundation for agentic experiences:
“AI-powered payments are not just a trend—they’re a transformation,” said Craig Vosburg, Chief Services Officer at Mastercard. “Payments must be intrinsic to the agentic experience. We are creating 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.”
“We are collaborating with partners across the ecosystem to establish the standards and tools that will define agentic commerce,” said Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard. “We are committed to enabling a trusted environment for AI-powered payments to scale globally.”
For More News And Analysis About Botswana Follow Africa-Press
