Payments networks Visa and Mastercard are moving toward deployment of their agentic AI payments tools globally in 2026, leadership at both said during their earnings calls this week. 

These agentic AI payments tools are bots that act on behalf of consumers throughout their payment processes, Mastercard Chief Executive Michael Miebach said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Jan. 29, adding that “agentic commerce represents another avenue to enable payment choice with the same trust that we always deliver.”

Mastercard in April 2025 launched its AgentPay solution, which enables all U.S.-based issuers to provide such payments capabilities to their customers. This year, the company aims to enable global issuers to do the same, Miebach said.  

In Q4, Mastercard’s AgentPay went live with the following: 

• Entertainment company Majid Alsattain in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; 

• Lloyds in London; 

• Santander in Madrid; and 

• E-Commerce group Ant International in Singapore. 

The Purchase, N.Y.-based Mastercard on Jan. 27 launched Mastercard Agent Suite, which helps institutions customize agentic AI tools for its customers to drive better experiences, Miebach said. 

“I think agentic commerce is going to come [and it] is gonna come fast,” Miebach said, adding that Mastercard sees agentic payments as the next evolution in digital payments and has already paved the path to drive adoption of the tool in 2026. 

The company did not provide total payment volume on AgentPay for 2025. 

During the quarter, Mastercard reported: 

• Net revenue of $8.8 billion, up 18% year over year; 

• Adjusted operating expenses of $3.7 billion, up 14% YoY; and 

• Revenue from value-added services and solutions of $3.8 billion, up 26% YoY. 

Visa’s agentic play 

Visa, similarly, is banking on the adoption of agentic payments as it looks to deploy its Visa Intelligence Commcerce tool at a mass scale in 2026. Visa Intelligent Commerce is Visa’s agentic AI solution. 

“We’re working to enable agentic commerce with more than 100 partners across the commerce ecosystem globally,” CEO Ryan McInerney said during the company’s fiscal first-quarter earnings call on Jan. 29. “Over 30 [financial institution] partners are actively building in our sandbox, with multiple agents and agent enablers running live production transactions.” 

Visa launched its agentic AI tool for B2B payments with spend management company Ramp in Q4, streamlining corporate bill payments, enabling its business customers to capture cash back on card payments and optimizing working capital, McInerney said. 

“We also reached an agreement with AWS to make Visa Intelligent Commerce available on AWS Marketplace to support developers building agentic commerce solutions,” McInerney said.  

“Our agentic solutions are live in the US and CEMEA [Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa], and we are initiating pilot programs in Asia Pacific and Europe.” 

During the quarter, Visa reported: 

• Net revenue of $10.9 billion, up 15% YoY; 

• Total transaction processes of 87.9 billion, up 8% YoY; and 

• Operating expense of $4.2 billion, up 27.1% YoY. 

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