Mastercard has launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a payments service designed for transactions initiated and executed by AI agents and machines. The company said the product is intended to support high-frequency, low-latency payments, including microtransactions.
More than 30 organisations are part of the initial partner group working with Mastercard to validate “priority use cases”. Participants include Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Getnet by Santander, Global Payments, Lovable Labs Incorporated, OKX, Stripe and Tempo among others.
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Mastercard said AP4M is intended for commerce environments where software systems transact continuously in the background. The company positioned the service as different from point-of-sale or person-to-merchant payments, which are typically user-initiated and processed as discrete transactions.
According to Mastercard, AP4M supports credentialing, transaction controls and settlement across multiple payment types. Supported rails include cards, accounts and stablecoins.
Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert said: “Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models.
“Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today — very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency.”
AP4M extends Mastercard’s Agent Pay programme introduced last year. The company said Agent Pay defines participation for “trusted AI agents” in payments, while AP4M is positioned as a “complementary opportunity” focused on scaling automated, machine-led transactions that take place continuously.
Mastercard said AP4M is built around four functions: credentialing, permissioning, transacting and settling.
Agents are credentialed and can be recognised across ecosystems using Verifiable Intent. Organisations can set authorisation rules and spending limits that are enforced programmatically.
Verified participants can connect across providers and systems to support continuous automated payments. For settlement, AP4M supports multi-rail settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins.
The card giant said this structure is intended to support predictable transaction processing and improve consistency.
