Is An AI Agent Making That Purchase? Mastercard Wants FIs To Know
By CU Today Staff —
PURCHASE, N.Y.—Mastercard is expanding its Agent Pay program with new tools designed to help financial institutions and merchants determine when payments are being initiated by artificial intelligence agents and whether those transactions should be approved.
The first new service, being rolled out for testing in the U.S., will assign a probability score indicating the likelihood that a transaction was initiated by an AI agent. Mastercard said it plans to add intelligence involving behavior, merchant and credential risk, transaction patterns and consumer activity to give issuers more context when evaluating agent-driven transactions.
“AI agents will make commerce more intuitive, efficient and personal — but only if people and businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf,” said Ann Johnson, executive vice president, security solutions at Mastercard. “By adding new agentic intelligence and risk insights to each transaction, we are giving people the confidence to say ‘yes,’ however they choose to pay.”
The services are part of Mastercard’s Agent Pay Trust Framework and are intended to help banks and merchants distinguish legitimate AI-agent purchases from suspicious activity while reducing unnecessary declines. Mastercard is also working with Cloudflare on combining web and payment-network signals in privacy-preserving environments and with Skyfire on technology that allows financial institutions and merchants to identify and verify AI agents.
Originally reported by CU Today.