MILWAUKEE–Fiserv and Mastercard said they have expanded their partnership to support agentic commerce, as payments companies move to establish how artificial intelligence systems can securely initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers.
Under the agreement, Fiserv said it will integrate Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework into its merchant acceptance infrastructure, enabling AI-initiated purchases to be authenticated, tokenized and settled through existing card network rails at a “time when autonomous agents are beginning to move from experimentation into live commerce environments.”
“The announcement reflects a growing effort by processors and networks to adapt payment systems built for human interaction to a model in which software increasingly executes transactions,” Fiserv said in a statement. “While agent-driven commerce remains nascent, Fiserv and Mastercard are positioning their infrastructure as a control layer that determines how, and under what conditions, those transactions can occur.”
Bringing AI Agents Into the Existing Payments Stack
According to Fiserv, at the center of the partnership is Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework, a set of technical and governance standards designed to allow artificial intelligence agents to transact within established card payment systems. The framework combines network tokenization, authentication and fraud controls to validate AI-initiated transactions without exposing sensitive card credentials.
Fiserv said it will integrate Mastercard’s Secure Card on File technology and act as a network token requestor for merchants.
“Tokenization replaces card numbers with network-issued tokens, allowing transactions to be processed while reducing the risk associated with storing or transmitting raw payment data,” the company explained. “In the agentic commerce context, tokenization enables AI systems to execute purchases without direct access to underlying credentials.”
Authentication Mechanisms
The framework also includes authentication mechanisms intended to distinguish authorized AI agents from malicious automation, according to Fiserv.
“Rather than relying solely on human-centric signals such as passwords or one-time codes, the system evaluates whether an AI agent has been approved to act on a user’s behalf and whether the transaction falls within predefined parameters,” the company stated.
Fiserv said the integration allows merchants to accept agent-initiated transactions without building custom logic to manage AI behavior. Transactions initiated by AI agents would move through the same authorization, settlement and reconciliation flows merchants already use, including those embedded in Fiserv’s Clover point-of-sale and eCommerce platforms.
Fiserv and Mastercard did not disclose timelines for broad merchant rollout or expected transaction volumes tied to agent-initiated payments.
