Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines

div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown"> Mastercard on June 9 launched Agent Pay for Machines, a new payments service designed to handle transactions executed by AI agents at machine speed.

The tool can handle microtransactions worth fractions of a cent as autonomous commerce begins reshaping how businesses buy and sell services.

[caption id="attachment_57364971" align="alignright" width="300"] Courtesy/Bloomberg[/caption] The service allows transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated and settled across Mastercard's global network, supporting payments across cards, accounts and stablecoins, according to Mastercard's June 10 release.

More than 30 industry partners including Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Getnet by Santander, Global Payments, OKX, Stripe and Tempo are among the first to support adoption, it said.

"Agent Pay for Machines [AP4M] will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models," Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's chief product officer, said in the release.

"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."

ALSO READ: Inside look: AWS’ agentic payments tool for developers The launch targets a new category of commerce distinct from traditional point-of-sale or person-to-merchant payments.

For example, an entrepreneur opening a flower shop could instruct an AI agent to build and launch the store's web presence — buying a domain name, hosting, images and checkout pages within a defined budget — turning one human-initiated request into a chain of transactions executed automatically across providers, the release said.

The service builds on Mastercard's Agent Pay program, introduced in 2025.

Where Agent Pay governs how trusted agents participate in payments, AP4M is designed for the automated, micro and machine-driven transactions that run continuously in the background of digital commerce, the release said.

Partners signaled that infrastructure decisions made now will define the space.

"Machine-to-machine payments are still in their early stages, but the infrastructure decisions made now will determine how this space develops," Karan Katyal, head of Agentic Commerce at Adyen, said in the release.

"We're seeing a fundamental shift in commerce as businesses increasingly use AI agents to transact on their behalf," Chris Harmse, co-founder and chief business officer at BVNK, said in the release. "Our position at the intersection of currencies, rails and formats makes us uniquely well-suited to power agentic commerce at scale."

Register here for the FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas.

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