Buying the new bike you’ve been thinking about can be easier than it sounds. Many people today are using AI‑powered assistants to narrow down options and find the right fit, whether that’s for city commuting, weekend trails or everyday reliability.
Until recently, that experience would break at the moment of payment. Agentic commerce could help people decide but not actually pay. It’s something that the industry has been working hard to address. In controlled, consent‑based scenarios, consumers can now authorise an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf, using credentials they already trust.
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AI-initiated transactions – from concept to reality
It’s a clear sign that Europe has moved from concept to reality. What was once a theoretical discussion about AI‑initiated transactions is now being proven across markets through real‑world pilots, issuer enablement and ecosystem collaboration.
Europe’s progress in agentic commerce is now moving beyond theory. Banks across Europe have already completed controlled, live agentic transactions, using passkeys for authentication. These pilots show that having the necessary infrastructure in place is making trusted agentic payments viable in a way not seen before.
This is a foundational step, ensuring the ecosystem is ready as AI agents begin to play a more active role in commerce. It means having the right building blocks from the start – from tokenisation and authentication to strong consumer consent – bringing visibility and traceability to every transaction.
At the same time, acceptance is evolving
Mastercard together with Worldline and ING performed a live end-to-end, fully regionally orchestrated agentic transaction, with all elements of the transaction flow based in Europe. This milestone helps turn readiness into real merchant capability, ensuring that payments initiated by AI agents can be processed transparently and responsibly at scale. It also shows how collaboration across issuers, acquirers and payment service providers can move agentic commerce from isolated pilots to repeatable models.
Each of these milestones builds confidence that agentic payments can work for everyone, consumers, banks and merchants alike.
Trust remains central to making this work
Approaches such as Verifiable Intent will play a critical role in ensuring consumers and financial institutions alike can be confident that the action taken by an AI agent can be traced back to explicit authorisation, with clear visibility for issuers and strong governance across the flow.
Taken together, agentic commerce needs continued work on shared standards and common frameworks just as much as it needs investment in maintaining technical progress. It’s why Mastercard is working alongside partners like the FIDO Alliance and Google to help advance common frameworks for trusted, user-consented interactions in AI-driven experiences.
At the same time, it has enabled issuers in Europe at a network level for Agent Pay, while supporting European investment with the recently announced Lisbon Centre of Excellence for Innovation, accelerating the development of next-generation, agent-driven payment experiences.
Agentic commerce represents a new chapter in how people interact with digital services. And Europe is helping write it. By combining innovation with accountability, and momentum with discipline, we are seeing the groundwork laid for AI‑driven commerce that can scale responsibly, so that even something like finding and buying the right bike feels simple, safe and firmly under the consumer’s control.
Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President, Core Payments Europe, Mastercard
Banks that have completed transactions: ABANCA, Alpha Bank Cyprus, Banco Santander, Bank Hapoalim, Bank of Cyprus, Bank PEKAO S.A., BCR (Romanian Commercial Bank), Bunq, Carrefour Banque, Cembra, Cornèrcard, ČSOB Czechia, ČSOB Slovakia, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, Erste Bank Österreich, Eurobank Limited, Eurobank Greece, Isrcard, ING, KBC, mBank, N26, National Bank of Greece, Nickel, NLB, OTP Bank, Postbank (Eurobank Bulgaria AD), Raiffeisen Bank Croatia, Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit Bank Austria, UniCredit Bulbank Bulgaria, United Bulgarian Bank (KBC Group), UniCredit Polska, Universo, Viseca, Zagrebačka Bank Croatia.
