Visa & Mastercard Integrate AI Technology Into Payments, Cards & More

The craze of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has gripped every industry in the world—captivating the interest of businesses for professional and individuals for personal use.

As a result, businesses aren’t just adopting the technology to enhance their internal processes and boost productivity but also integrating it to improve customer experiences.

The latest bout of AI-mania comes from the financial technology sector, where fintech giants Mastercard and Visa made back-to-back announcements about their latest AI crusades, which focus on benefiting their customers as well as back-office processes.

So, what’s new with the two financial sector leaders?  

Mastercard Agent Pay

Launching its Agentic Payments Program, Mastercard unveiled Mastercard Agent Pay, a new solution that utilizes agentic AI to deliver smarter, more secure, and more personalized payment experiences to consumers, merchants, and issuers.

The agent will bring users and businesses tailored recommendations and insights with trusted, seamless payment experiences through enhanced generative AI (GenAI) conversations.

Users can interact with a GenAI-powered chatbot to plan events, curate products to purchase or venues to book, and gain other key details before the intelligent agent recommends the best way to pay and makes the required purchases based on user preferences.

For enterprises, it can handle sourcing, optimize payment terms and manage logistics, even international ones, and expedite cross-border purchases and deliveries. Businesses can also leverage Mastercard’s tokenization technology to identify and validate customers to offer consistent and personalized shopping experiences.

Mastercard will also work with Microsoft and other AI platforms to develop and deploy new use cases in Agent Pay, as well as integrate Microsoft’s technologies with Mastercard’s payment solutions, while a collaboration with IBM will look to boost B2B capabilities.

The move will facilitate safe and secure transactions, come with clear rules for consumer control, measures to protect against fraud and support consumer disputes, and ensure the secure registration and authentication of trusted agents.

This program also introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens, which uses proven tokenization capabilities, helping consumers and businesses transact with trust, security, and control. This will be applied to partnerships with Braintree, Checkout.com, and other acquirers and checkout platforms to improve tokenization capabilities.

“The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology,” said Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard.

“Recognizing the seismic implications of this evolution, we are keen to collaborate with industry players to advance the standards for agentic payments, such as applying the Model Context Protocol to Secure Remote Commerce. This lays the foundation for scale and builds trust in agentic commerce.”


Ahead of this, Mastercard announced new partnerships with OKX and Nuvei to unlock a 360-degree approach where consumers can spend stablecoins and merchants can receive them, creating a seamless ecosystem.

The company also invested in Corpay’s cross-border business unit, making it an exclusive partner for commercial cross-border payments connecting Mastercard’s financial institution customers.

Mastercard collaborated with MoneyGram to provide customers worldwide with fast, secure, and near real-time payments by advancing digital money movement.

In Canada, CIBC launched CIBC Adapta Mastercard, the first credit card that automatically adapts to spending behavior, rewards cardholders more for everyday purchases, and helps cardholders easily identify their credit card by using Touch Card by Mastercard.

So, that’s what’s up with Mastercard. What’s new with Visa? 

Visa Intelligent Commerce

A day after Mastercard’s announcement, Visa popped up with one of its own.

Leveraging the power of its network and decades-long expertise, Visa is bringing trust and security to AI-driven commerce by introducing the world to Visa Intelligent Commerce, a solution that enables AI to find and buy.

“Soon, people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase, and manage on their behalf. These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer.

“Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop, and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences. Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.”

The solution offers personalized, secure AI commerce on a global scale and is built with the help of Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe, and more. It also uses Visa’s 30 years of expertise working with AI and machine learning to manage risk and fraud to enable safe and secure payment experiences.

Forestell added, “We’re working with companies at the forefront of AI innovation to encourage AI platform participation and support new ways to pay with security and trust as our number one priority. Together with our partners, we fully embrace AI’s potential to transform all aspects of commerce, payments, and business.”

Visa aims to make AI commerce a seamless, secure, and personalized experience for merchants and consumers alike through Visa Intelligent Commerce, which brings a suite of integrated APIs and a commercial partner program to AI platforms.

It comes with AI-ready cards, which replaces card details with tokenized digital credentials; AI-powered personalization, which offers improved agent performance and personalized shopping recommendations; and simple and secure AI payments, where users can set spending limits and conditions.

“Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce.”


The announcement came as part of Visa’s Global Product Drop event, which focused on Visa’s plan to introduce a new era of commerce featuring AI and mentioned a wide range of new partnerships.

This included a partnership with Stripe’s Bridge, a leading stablecoin orchestration platform, which included an announcement of a new card-issuing product.

This would enable fintech developers using Bridge to offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration, while cardholders can make everyday purchases from a stablecoin balance at any merchant location that accepts Visa, essentially covering more than 150 million merchants.

"Partnering with Bridge represents a significant move in helping to make stablecoins usable in everyday life, giving consumers more choice in how they manage and spend their money,” said Jack Forestell.

Do you think these moves by Visa and Mastercard will usher in a new era of AI-powered commerce?

Let us know in the comments below!