Visa and Mastercard have both announced investments in agentic payments. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect enables businesses to integrate AI-driven shopping and payments. Meanwhile, Mastercard Agent Pay is now available in Malaysia and Singapore, with plans to expand the feature across Asia in the near future. Yet while the technology is promising, there are barriers to uptake for both consumers and merchants.
Agentic payments involve AI agents transacting on behalf of consumers. Key use cases include automating routine purchases and optimising spending by automatically buying a product when the price drops below a certain pre-defined threshold. As a result, agentic payments represent a shift from convenience to delegation, which has the potential to make online payments even more seamless for consumers.
GlobalData Online Consumer Payments Analytics 2025
However, one of the key barriers to consumer uptake will be trust. GlobalData’s Online Consumer Payments Analytics 2025 notes that 8% of global consumers do not make online purchases due to fraud risk. This proportion would almost certainly be higher when considering an AI tool making purchases on their behalf. In addition, many consumers may feel uncomfortable letting AI agents control their money due to concerns about unwanted purchases.
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To help address such barriers, Mastercard’s Agent Pay includes security measures such as strong authentication, transaction monitoring, spending limits, and user controls. The aim is to ensure that transactions are authorised, transparent, and secure, which will be essential if consumers are to relinquish control to AI agents. Such safeguards will be mandatory to drive uptake of agentic payments; even with them in place, consumer adoption is likely to be gradual at best.
Visa Intelligent Commerce Connect
On the merchant side, Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect addresses a different barrier: integration complexity. By enabling businesses to accept AI-initiated payments via a single integration, Visa is aligning with key SME priorities. GlobalData’s SME Payment Acceptance Analytics 2025 notes that markets including Singapore, India, and Australia view ease of integration and transaction speed as among the most important factors SMEs consider when adopting payment solutions.
In terms of barriers, merchants may be hesitant to prioritise agentic payment integrations without clear evidence of consumer demand or incremental revenue uplift. In addition, regulatory frameworks around liability, consent, and dispute resolution in agent-initiated payments are still evolving—which means some merchants will wait for clarity before embracing the technology.
Ultimately, the success of agentic payments will depend less on technological capability (which is advancing rapidly) and more on ecosystem alignment, including consumer trust, regulatory clarity, and merchant adoption. If these elements converge, agentic solutions could shift payments from a point-of-sale activity to an embedded, invisible function within broader digital interactions.
Bhavya Patel is an Associate Analyst, Banking & Payments, GlobalData
