SAN FRANCISCO– Mastercard has added trust and intelligence services to its Agent Pay program to help financial institutions and merchants assess payments initiated by artificial intelligence agents, the company announced Sept. 30.
The services combine identity, intent, behavioral and fraud insights to support authorization decisions, reduce unnecessary friction and improve consumers’ payment experiences, according to Mastercard. They form the intelligence layer of the company’s Agent Pay Trust Framework.
Among the additions is a probability score indicating the likelihood that an AI agent initiated a transaction. Other signals help financial institutions and merchants determine whether activity is unusual or requires additional review, Mastercard said.
“AI agents will make commerce more intuitive, efficient and personal — but only if people and businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf,” Ann Johnson, Mastercard’s executive vice president of security solutions, said in the announcement.
“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,” Johnson said.
How Agent Pay Works
Mastercard launched Agent Pay in April 2025 as a payments program designed to support agentic commerce, in which AI agents help consumers and businesses shop and transact on their behalf.
Mastercard also has developed agentic tokens and standards to support transactions initiated by AI agents. The company is working with merchants on those standards while keeping consumers in control of purchasing decisions, Aikat said.
