Today, Mastercard announced an expansion of Agent Pay, its agentic payments program, with new trust and intelligence services that provide greater context for AI-initiated transactions.
By bringing together identity, intent, behavioral and fraud insights, the services give financial institutions and merchants a clearer, shared understanding of AI-driven activity – enabling smarter authorization decisions, less unnecessary friction and more seamless experiences for consumers.
These new services form the intelligence layer of Mastercard’s Agent Pay Trust Framework, which brings together identity, intent, controls, execution and intelligence to establish trust across agentic commerce.
Agentic commerce is moving into the mainstream, with one in 10 consumers projected to routinely use agents to make purchases by 2030. As agentic commerce grows, banks and merchants need to understand when an agent is involved, what it has been asked to do and whether the activity is legitimate.
“AI agents will make commerce more intuitive, efficient and personal — but only if people and businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf,” said Ann Johnson, executive vice president, Security Solutions at Mastercard. “By adding new agentic intelligence and risk insights to each transaction, we are giving people the confidence to say ‘yes,’ however they choose to pay.”
The first service, rolling out for testing in the U.S., is a probability score indicating the likelihood that a transaction was initiated by an AI agent – giving issuers the confidence to approve legitimate agent-led purchases. Over time, Mastercard will strengthen this score with more intelligence related to behavior, merchant risk, transaction patterns, credential risk and consumer propensity, providing an even clearer picture of AI-driven activity across the transaction lifecycle.
Beyond the probability score, the new agentic trust and intelligence signals give ecosystem participants a common understanding of what is happening behind a purchase by answering whether activity is consistent with expected behavior, whether anything unusual requires review, and whether the transaction should be approved or need additional checks.
Mastercard is working with partners, including Cloudflare, to create privacy-preserving environments to better understand AI-driven payment activity. Mastercard is also working with Skyfire, a provider of Know Your Agent (KYA) technology for AI agent identity, verification and payments.
Quotes included from Todd Kennedy (Capital One), Stephanie Cohen (Cloudflare), Amir Sarhangi (Skyfire), and Suzanne Sando (Javelin Strategy & Research).