Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines to Unlock Super-Fast, Always-On Payments

About this update from Mastercard Incorporated

The rise of AI has created new ways to buy and sell goods and services. Now it’s requiring a new class of payments. Mastercard envisions a future where businesses create services for AI agents to buy and use. Operating at machine speed, these agents could transact with each other continuously at high velocity, executing chains of transactions, including microtransactions. This shift could unlock a massive new wave of innovation, business models and economic activity, where any company, from solopreneurs to the largest enterprises, can become a virtual powerhouse. To enable this new form of commerce, Mastercard developed a new way to pay for these services: payments, some only fractions of a cent, to be completed quickly, programmatically and securely. Today, the company is introducing Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new service that will allow these transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated and settled at machine speed across its global payments network. “Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer. “Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today — very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency.” Unlike traditional point-of-sale or person-to-merchant payments, which are discrete and user-initiated, these transactions are programmatic, always-on and executed between systems in the background of digital commerce. Agent Pay for Machines allows Mastercard network participants to bring the trust and controls of the company’s global network to machine-driven commerce, helping AI innovators enable secure, reliable payments as software begins to transact on its own. Building a new class of payments AI agents are no longer just assisting decisions. They are able to act on human intent, coordinate services and complete transactions that are bespoke for their users. An entrepreneur opening a flower shop could instruct an AI agent to build and launch the store's web presence — buying a domain name, a hosting service, images and checkout pages within a defined budget — turning one human-initiated request into a chain of transactions executed automatically across providers. Or a logistics agent managing a delivery route could pay for freight, r...

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