Mastercard, Visa launch tools to govern AI shopping agents

Mastercard ↘ 0.14% is introducing an autonomous payment feature this week in collaboration with startup Alchemy, which enables users to create virtual cards for AI bots with specific spending limits and purchase restrictions, according to The Wall Street Journal News Corp ↗ 0.39%. The move comes as both Mastercard and Visa ↘ 0.04% roll out a suite of tools designed to govern how AI agents transact on behalf of consumers, marking one of the payments industry's most coordinated efforts to shape the emerging field of agentic commerce.wsj

New Tools to Govern AI Shopping Agents

Mastercard launched Agent Connect and expanded its Agent Suite for Merchants, products that help businesses support AI-powered shopping while retaining control over pricing, fulfillment and brand experience. Agent Connect provides an integration point for AI agents to reach merchants and payment providers, with Mastercard supplying governance, monitoring and controls.americanbanker

A related product, Agent Pay, uses a system called Verifiable Intent, developed with Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 1.35%, that binds an AI agent's actions to a user's stated authorization, creating a verifiable chain of what the consumer approved and what the agent executed.americanbanker

"Agentic commerce will only scale at the speed of trust," Sherri Haymond, executive vice president of digital commercialization at Mastercard, told American Banker.americanbanker

Visa responded with its own AI risk products, including the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform with Trusted Agent Protocol and Intelligent Commerce Connect. Only 23 percent of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payments on their behalf, according to Visa research released in early September.americanbanker

Know-Your-Agent Framework and Industry Collaboration

Mastercard, Visa and Ant International have begun collaborating on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework designed to verify AI purchasing agents across card networks, digital wallets and marketplaces. Each agent would be linked to a validated operator or cardholder, enabling clear attribution of activity, and would be assessed against security and behavioral requirements with continuous monitoring.gurufocus+1

Mastercard expects more than one in ten online shoppers to routinely let AI agents make purchases for them by 2030, while its Agent Pay for Machines initiative already has more than 30 supporters, including Stripe, Coinbase ↗ 2.36% and Cloudflare ↗ 2.47%.gurufocus

Travel as a Testing Ground

Separately, Mastercard and Trip.com ↗ 0.10% announced on September 16 a collaboration to bring agentic-commerce capabilities to Trip.com's AI assistant TripGenie, showcased at Arabian Travel Market in Dubai. Built with Network International and Mastercard's Agent Suite, the solution allows travelers to search, book and pay through an AI-led journey, with a phased commercial launch expected in early 2027.mastercard+1

"An agent can be trusted and still misunderstand an instruction or spend more than it was allowed to," Louis Hoch, CEO of payments company Usio, told American Banker. "Before a payment goes through, there needs to be a check that the purchase falls within the permission the customer actually gave."americanbanker