Mastercard Partners With PayPal To Strengthen Agentic AI Commerce

Papal has integrated Mastercard’s agentic payments platform to enable AI agents to complete transactions on behalf of their customers. Mastercard says the collaboration will allow tens of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers globally to enable agents to make payments on their behalf. PayPal will co-develop and test with merchants and agents while piloting the Mastercard Agent Pay Acceptance Framework, according to the announcement.

Mastercard will allow cardholders to have access to their credentials through PayPal checkout. They can access these details wherever PayPal is accepted.

The Initiative Will Empower Consumers To Participate In Agentic Commerce
Michelle Gill, Executive Vice President, small business and financial services, PayPal, commented on the partnership. She noted that the collaboration will integrate Mastercard’s Agent Pay into its wallet, empowering consumers and merchants to participate in agentic commerce with flexibility and trust.

The move will enable consumers to make purchases with assistance provided by artificial intelligence. The initiative is open to all PayPal users, while Mastercard will offer the secure payment rails. The partnership will be available at all PayPal merchants and Mastercard’s co-branded debit and credit cards. According to the partnering firms, the move will create a shared infrastructure for agent-driven commerce globally.

PayPal will ensure that all the AI-assisted payments meet the required verification and security standards. The collaboration will utilize tokenization as its passkey authentication, allowing users to safely authorize their AI agents. It will also enable the merchants to accept the agent-based payments without additional verification or technical support.

The collaboration highlights Mastercard’s Agent Pay technology as the driver of an emerging ecosystem that links intelligent systems, merchants, and wallets. This gives both firms a strong footing in what many see as the next frontier of digital payments.

Mastercard is partnering with Other Platforms To Drive Agentic Commerce

Chief Executive Officer of Mastercard, Pablo Fourez, stated that the deal highlights the growing importance of agentic AI and how it’s moving from pilot face to real-world application.

He noted that the company is not working alone in using this innovative AI technology for payments. The collaboration will extend broadly to other platforms and partners across the industry to ensure that agentic commerce happens securely.

One of the challenges the companies may face to fully deploying agentic commerce is the issue of trust and security. But Fourez says the initiative has been tested in pilot phases for a long time, and security will not be a challenge.

Fourez says this partnership is one of several other collaborations driving the next stage AI-powered commerce. The firm has made recent deals with AponAI, Cloudflare, and Google. He said the dispute management, consent capture, and agent verification are important scaling points to ensure an effective and seamless agent-to-merchant transaction.