Vaidik Trivedi 9:52:01
Hello and welcome to the FinAI podcast presented by FinAI News. Today, september 4, 2026. My name is Vedic Trivedi, and I am the deputy editor of FinAI News. The FinAI podcast covers current trends and intriguing topics on AI applications and beyond, making it your definitive source for insights and news surrounding AI in financial services. Joining the podcast is Pablo Fourez, the Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard. Thanks for being here, Pablo.

Pablo Fourez 9:52:36
Thank you so much. My pleasure to be here. So let’s start with you telling our listeners a bit about yourself and what you do at Mastercard. Thanks. So my name is Pablo Fourez, and I am Chief Digital Officer for Mastercard. And in general, I’m responsible for everything to do with digital payments, and the objective being to deliver safe and secure payments and commerce for businesses, for consumers, and for all the financial institutions connected on our network. We want to connect and enable commerce, and our mission is really to have the most trusted to invent and to build and to and to run the most trusted payment network, that in a in a shorthand is what we’re about.

Vaidik Trivedi 9:53:27
According to precedence research, agentic AI market size is expected to balloon to nearly 200 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 43% Given that Mastercard is one of the biggest payments company on the planet, how are you thinking about Agent AI Commerce right now? And when you talk about Agent EI Commerce, what do you really mean?

Pablo Fourez 9:53:55
Um. So, so, I mean, maybe start with with with the basics. Is we are all using you know agents in our everyday life today for many many different tasks, right? To research things, to write a paper, to if you have my daughters, you know, they use it for for prepare for exams, you know, like so many different things, right? And this technology is incredibly powerful. You know, it makes our lives, our everyday lives, you know, so much more efficient in so many different ways, and and it’s very clear that it’s going to transform how commerce is done. Right, it’s going to help consumers. You know, like you know, research. You know, like things that they want to find and buy, and you know, make purchases for them is going to help businesses facilitate, you know, business-to-business transactions. And so that’s what what what AI commerce is about. Is when you have this incredible technology of AI that becomes agentic, so it can do things on your behalf, right? Whether you’re a consumer or a business, and it would help complete a commerce purchase for you. So that’s the the I think the big paradigm shift that we are in the process of you know that we are living today. You know I think I’m you know like you know about 10, 10, 15 years ago, we had the transition from desktop to mobile, and that was a very big change for commerce as well. And here is one more of such transformations, probably even bigger. And we are right at the beginning of it, you know, of this big transformation of commerce. and yeah, and the way that that how we think about it is how can we how can we do that? How can we help that facilitate meeting consumers and merchants businesses where they are, enabling the experiences and the flows that they want to deliver in a way that is safe and is secure.

Vaidik Trivedi 9:55:57
So Mastercard has been at the forefront of all forms of digital payments, starting in the 1980s, from card payments to today with tap to pay payments. How do you think agentic AI payments will change the organization in itself?

Pablo Fourez 9:56:15
So yeah, it’s a big change, I would say. And so, so think about it this way, perhaps. Like one way to think about it is that for the last, you know, so many years, as you said, there have only been two two really ways for two transactions or digital transactions. Either the transaction is initiated by the consumer, or the transaction is initiated by the merchant, right? That would be like a consumer buying something, or if you have a subscription, you know, like the merchant will initiate the payment, you know, for example, adding, you know, every month. And that’s those are really the only two ways in which you know we’ve had transactions so far. And now we have an. Another type of transaction where an agent, you know, is is facilitating or doing the transaction on behalf of the user, and so that’s a huge huge change because all of the systems have been somewhat built around this notion that it’s either the consumer or the merchant doing the transaction, and so that’s, I think, one of the big things in which I think it’s it’s very different. And then the other way I find that it’s the other reason why, or the other way in which I find it very different is that the agents can also do transactions more autonomously. And so, one thing is to have an agent doing the transaction for me. But if it’s doing it autonomously, then it means how do I know that the agent is acting on my behalf? How does a merchant know that they can trust the agent? How to ensure that the agent, you know, actually follows my instructions? And so the whole notion around autonomous agent e-commerce, on the one hand, is incredibly appealing and powerful because that’s where the agent can bring the most value and facilitate, make things simple for me. And on the other hand, it’s where maybe there are more questions around how to ensure that things work as planned and and in a in a safe and trusted way.

Vaidik Trivedi 9:58:22
So, who is more excited about agentic AI payments? Are these financial institutions, merchants, or consumers? Where do you see the biggest adoption push coming from?

Pablo Fourez 9:58:37
So, I think it’s. I would say all everybody, you know, like wants to to look at this incredible technology and trying to think how can I take advantage of it, right? If you think it from a from a merchant perspective, you know, I believe it’s an opportunity to to better serve consumers, you know, to deliver to consumers a more personal experience, perhaps. Right. At the same time, merchants also think, well, like, how does it work? Am I going to get disintermediated in this experience somehow? How can I maintain loyalty with the shopper, right? And so the technology is is is like any new brand brand new technology. It comes then with a lot of questions from the different participants or you know players saying how do I take advantage of it to to to innovate and to bring better experiences to consumers, and then, and on the other hand, with questions around, you know, what’s my role, how do I need to evolve, and and how will it impact my businesses, my business, and so, so on every side, I would say you have a mix of both questions, you know, like excitement towards what the technology can deliver because it’s such a powerful technology, and on the other hand, questions around how the business will change.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:00:04
So let’s talk about Agent Pay, which has been live for almost a year. Tell us how the first year of the rollout has been, and what are the top use cases that you have seen Agent Pay being deployed for?

Pablo Fourez 10:00:20
And so it has been an incredible journey so far. I would say that that I was talking a bit about earlier about this notion of excitement that you were talking about, but for the industry, this being such a big change, a lot of work has gone into trying to figure out the answers to those questions. You know, like about how to bring this to market, and a lot of I would say experimentation and and and experiences to bring to consumers and trial things. And so we have seen, you know, many different things in market and some changes in the market as people evolve their offerings to to test and learn, basically. So that has been great. I think a huge amount of collaboration on the industry around standardization. We have, you know, put a lot of effort and and have been really very excited to collaborate with others to build the foundations to have this trusted layer for agentic commerce, and so that has been some some huge inroads there. We have launched, you know, like not just since since last April. Now we have rolled out agent pay to pretty much every country where we operate, and we have enabled all of our customer banks to participate in agentic commerce, which is very exciting. And we have, you know, launched with merchants and done live transactions in many different markets and with many different partners as well. So that you know, very, very, very incredibly exciting as a journey. But I would say, I would say, still, you know, like still relatively early days in terms of of scale, in terms of number of transactions and quantity of merchants. You know, like the scale of adoption basically on the merchant side.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:02:20
So you have rolled it out for your entire global banking network. That’s right. Are banks excited to adopt it? And can you walk us through how the adoption of Agent Pay might look like for a bank?

Pablo Fourez 10:02:38
Yeah, yeah, with pleasure. So, so what I would say is this: like, what, what, what, or job, like, what we’re trying to do on the one hand is, as I was saying before, setting up some foundations in terms of standards, and I’ll talk. Maybe we we can talk about that a little bit more to drive the security and the trust in these transactions, but because we also want to enable all of the massacre cardholders to be able to experience these transactions and to and to try if they want and you know if they are doing if they if they want to use for example you know like an experience with Google, with Buy for Me, or Amazon, or in ChatGPT, or wherever they want to experience this agentic flows. We want to make it possible for every Mastercard cardholder out there. And so, what we have done is enable this on our network, on you know, enable our issuers on our network for the technology, and so we provide a number of what I call on-be-health services. Tokenisation is one of them. Authentication service. We now have an intent validation service that is core to the value proposition for agentic dispute resolution services, and so all of that, you know, we bring on our network, and that’s what makes it so easy for, or relatively easy for for all of our banks to participate, and that’s why we have been able to enable the banks and our customers to to to enable these experiences.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:04:17
I know you said that it’s very early days of this technology being rolled out. It has been less than a year. Can you tell me the name of any FIs that have approached you to use Agent Pay or some bank where the technology is live?

Pablo Fourez 10:04:35
We we are working pretty much across across the industry, we’re working with Google. We’re working with you know, like I don’t want to to you know you know like you know like we’ve done many announcements and and and you know like and partner with a number of players. You know, Braintree, Microsoft, IBM, Checkout, PayPal, Adian, WorldPay, GetNet. You know, like I can go across these, like both on the acceptance side, on the FI side, on the on the you know digital side, smaller companies, bigger companies across the board. The level of interest on this is is incredible, and the level of participation is incredible.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:05:24
So, all these companies that you named, is everyone coming together to build an industry level standard where everyone can understand how different agents are supposed to interact with each other?

Pablo Fourez 10:05:39
Let me perhaps talk a little bit about how we are bringing control and trust to these transactions. A key, a key element, you know, like if you are if you are a merchant and you are and you are now seeing these agents or some someone that’s not a consumer buying on your website, you you know you first want to figure out well is that is that an agent I can trust, is it is it not? You know what do I need to do, right? And so that’s a key question. Then you have, if you know that’s an agent you can trust, how do you know that actually this agent is acting on behalf and is authorized to make a purchase by the cardholder. And how do you, and so that you can actually fulfill the purchase? And so those are some very, you know, core questions that need to be answered for for commerce to happen and for for being able to take advantage of this technology, and so and it’s very important in our view to develop standards so that you know this works for merchants and for consumers in a broad way, and so that the agentic commerce can be developed. And so one of the things that. We did is we worked very closely with Google and with others to develop a new specification, which you know we name verifiable intent. And what verifiable intent does, it links, it provides the answers to those key questions. It helps basically a merchant understand that this is actually an agent that they can trust, and that that agent, you know, like is acting on behalf of a consumer. It’s authorized, has been authorized by the user to make a purchase, and then when the purchase is completed with verifiable intent, the merchant and the agent have have a common record of the transaction that they can rely on as a proof of the transaction and the interaction that they did, and that can be leveraged in the future if there would be any dispute related to the transaction to resolve those disputes. And so, verifiable intent links the identity of the user, the authorization that they provided the agent and the action, you know, like the purchase that then was fulfilled between the agent and the merchant, in one, you know, record that is, you know, like secured cryptographically and that can be used, you know, as a as a source of trust for the transaction, so that you don’t need to assume trust, you can actually have it. You can verify it, and so this, as I was saying, is something that we have been working with Google, but also at the FIDO Alliance, within EMVCO, with others to use as a basis to develop the standards that we need to scale agentic coms.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:08:41
So you have been working with Google. Is this verifiable intent already been embedded into Agent Pay, or you are still in the process of doing that?

Pablo Fourez 10:08:51
Yeah. So we actually so so we we do support the intent in Agent Pay, and so like but what we have done is, we have actually published this specification for verifiable intent. We have actually open sourced it, and we have received since we did it a ton of basically industry feedback as well regarding it. And so we are working within the industry to evolve it and to see what needs how it needs to evolve for meeting the needs of different industries, different types of payments, different types of commerce flows, and so it’s you know altogether a very collaborative and very interesting effort.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:09:37
Okay. Providing verifiable intent is a wonderful thing that you’re working on. Another big question that hangs around agentic AI payments is where does the liability sit if an agent makes a mistake? Have you or the industry come to a common conclusion on that front.

Pablo Fourez 10:10:00
Yeah, I think it’s such a core question. At the core of what you are asking is the the I think about two things. The first thing is the consumer needs to know that they can they can trust the interaction, right? Like they need to know that oh, I’m going to shop with this agent, and if something goes goes wrong, you know, like like am I protected, right? And that at the core is, you know, a key part of of the promise of Mastercard to to consumers. You know, like we’ll have your back if something goes wrong, and so 100% Now, like from a merchant perspective, the same is true. You know, a merchant is is selling goods and is accepting Mastercard, and what they expect is that they’re going to get paid, right? Like if they if they if they sell you some goods, you know, and they do the right things, they authentic, they they make sure that they support authentication, they support verify they they verify the intent. They do everything that they want. They want to make sure that they have a transaction they can trust, and they’re going to get paid as well. And and so what I would say is that the core verifiable intent is a technology that that enables both of those things to be possible. Basically, it enables the the the data that allows a merchant to trust these transactions, and enables us to provide this guarantee to consumers, and enables us to enable to work with banks. And if there are ever disputes between a cardholder and a merchant, we now have a record of this transaction that we can use to make sure to see whether, in fact, there was a mistake done or not, and how to resolve it. Which you know, without that, you would basically be flying blind, and you you will know how to how to resolve that. And so, at the core, that’s very much. I believe that that’s one of the most important things. This question that you. Is how to provide this this guarantee and this trust to the user, and they’ll expect that from Mastercard. That’s what will provide, you know, knowing that the consumer has protection, but at the same time helping the merchant trust the transaction.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:12:15
Given that you have been working on developing trust, and you are a tech-forward organization. Do you think trust is the biggest hurdle that agentic AI payments have to jump over, or is it the tech adoption of the tool?

Pablo Fourez 10:12:32
I mean, no. I, I, like any new technology, you know, like when you when you start, I think you know, like I don’t know, like recall when we started on the internet, and you would want, you know, people say, would would people buy clothes online, you know, without trying them, right? And people would say, oh no, I’m not going to do that because how do I trust that I’m going to get what I need? And and and today you see that’s very common, and and the businesses and industry have found a way of how to manage that. So I think it’s the same, you know, like with Agentic, it’s a new technology. It creates a number of new jobs to be done. You know, like merchants need to enable their product catalogs to be to be shoppable by agents. Then you know they need to, in the same way that in that 10 years ago they needed to make their website you know like accessible through a mobile phone, and so that’s a technology change that needs to happen, and and that will take some time, and consumers you know and businesses will will adapt and and and will experiment with the technology, and that will you know takes also some time. You know, like and the question of trust is one of the elements there. I don’t think it’s the only one, but it’s it’s one of the key questions.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:13:52
Okay.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:13:55
With a year that has passed since you have rolled out agent pay. What are your expectations from this tool in year two?

Pablo Fourez 10:14:07
Well, like more in general, I would say that that is the continuing development and adoption of agentic commerce and obviously agent pay being a framework set of services that we have at Mastercare to enable those interactions right in a safe and secure way, and so my expectation is that we’ll continue to see that evolution. I would say I fully expect that we’ll see more innovation and more experiences, and enabling those experiences for consumers and merchants is something that we are very keen to support. Trying more autonomous use cases that will deliver greater value for both, again, consumers and merchants, I believe, is something that we’re going to see more of in the coming 12 months. Very exciting also with the work that we are doing on more machine-to-machine payments, you know, account-to-account payments related to business-to-business payments related to In agentic flows, right, where an agent is buying from another agent. So I think we’ll continue to see a lot of innovation, and and over the past over the next 12 months.

Vaidik Trivedi 10:15:35
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai