Mastercard Pushes Agentic Commerce Live… and Australia Goes First
Hey Payments Fanatic!
Mastercard just completed Australia’s first fully authenticated agentic transactions on its network.
The transactions ran through Mastercard’s Agent Pay framework, with issuers, acquirers, and merchants all able to see that an agent initiated the payment, with cardholder consent.
A Commonwealth Bank debit card was used to buy cinema tickets. A Westpac credit card handled a travel booking. Different use cases, same principle. Agents inside the rails, not around them.
Under the hood, the transactions flowed through IPSI and were powered by Maincode’s sovereign LLM, Matilda. Proof that agentic payments can work across banks, merchants, and models.
Back on April 30, 2025, I flagged this first when Mastercard embraced stablecoins, invested in Corpay, and introduced Agent Pay. At the time, it was positioning.
👉 You can revisit the context I shared last year here.
Today, it’s execution. Agentic payments are no longer a concept on a slide. They’re running live, on real rails, with real cards.
What else is quietly reshaping Payments right now? Scroll down 👇 Catch up, and I’ll be back tomorrow in your inbox.
Cheers,
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NEWS
🇦🇺 Mastercard accelerates AI-powered commerce with Australia’s first authenticated agentic transactions using Agent Pay. By enabling fully recognized and authenticated agentic transactions, Mastercard’s trusted agentic framework process brings AI agents into the payment flow as visible, governed participants, ensuring that every transaction is secure, transparent, and trusted.
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GOLDEN NUGGET
𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐀𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐒𝐏𝐬 & 𝐀𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 by ACI Worldwide 👇Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻️
PSPs and Merchant Acquirers are entering a new era. The traditional stack — onboarding, routing, settlement, billing, fraud, and reporting — is being rebuilt around AI-native infrastructure.
AI removes manual work, increases approvals, reduces fraud, automates compliance, improves margins, and enables real-time decisioning across the entire acquiring chain.
Below is a clear view of where AI is reshaping the PSP infrastructure model.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤:
1️⃣ AI-Driven Fraud, Risk & Trust Infrastructure
→ Role: Real-time fraud detection, behavioral analysis, adaptive risk scoring, and automated decisioning.
↳ ACI Worldwide’s machine learning engine continuously retrains on billions of transactions to reduce false positives and increase trust.
2️⃣ Smart Authorization & Routing Engines
→ Role: Predictive issuer logic, L2 routing intelligence, scheme preference modeling, and dynamic retry strategies.
↳ Checkout.com leverages AI-driven issuer insights to optimize approval rates across global markets.
3️⃣ Merchant Onboarding & Underwriting Automation
→ Role: Automated KYC/KYB, document intelligence, AML screening, and risk-based onboarding workflows.
↳ Alloy uses ML-based identity intelligence to reduce onboarding friction and improve underwriting accuracy.
4️⃣ AI-Powered Disputes, Chargebacks & Compliance
→ Role: Case classification, evidence generation, dispute automation, fraud pattern clustering, and scheme-rule intelligence.
↳ Forter applies AI to categorize disputes and automate representments across issuers, acquirers, and PSPs.
5️⃣ AI for Merchant Reporting, Analytics & Personalized Insights
→ Role: Revenue intelligence, anomaly detection, pricing insights, & merchant-level optimization.
↳ Pagos delivers issuer and BIN-level intelligence that PSPs use to optimize routing, revenue, and merchant performance.
6️⃣ AI in Payments Orchestration & Optimization
→ Role: Traffic shaping, cost optimization, retry logic, scheme selection, FX intelligence, and routing automation.
↳ DEUNA uses AI-driven orchestration to unify acceptance, routing, and optimization into a programmable commerce layer.
7️⃣ AI-Powered Account, Wallet & Embedded Payments Infrastructure
→ Role: Balance forecasting, settlement optimization, automated treasury ops, and embedded finance logic.
↳ Dfns provides secure, policy-controlled wallet infrastructure that powers automated treasury and embedded payment flows.
Some PSPs do perform in all of those buckets:
↳ ACI Worldwide, Checkout.com, DEUNA and few others 😉
AI is not an add-on for PSPs — it is becoming the intelligence layer inside onboarding, routing, pricing, fraud, settlement, and merchant operations.
Source: ACI Worldwide
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