Mastercard and PayPal are expanding an existing partnership to include “agentic commerce”—a new model in which AI agents act on behalf of consumers or businesses to research, negotiate, and complete transactions. The collaboration will integrate Mastercard’s Agent Pay platform into PayPal’s digital wallet, allowing PayPal users to complete agentic AI-driven transactions.
Agentic commerce refers to the emerging ecosystem of autonomous AI agents that can execute commercial tasks such as purchasing, billing, or customer support without direct human involvement. As these agents become more capable, payment infrastructure is evolving to verify users, authenticate transactions, and prevent fraud to enable complex automated transactions.
Under the agreement, PayPal will pilot Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework to test interoperability with agent protocols, ensuring that digital agents can safely access and exchange payment data. Mastercard said its technology uses tokenization and authentication to validate users and protect sensitive information during agent-led purchases.
The companies expect the integration to reach hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants globally, simplifying participation in AI-driven commerce. For merchants, the addition of Mastercard Agent Pay within PayPal’s wallet means that existing PayPal checkout systems will automatically support agent-based transactions, without new technical requirements.
“Mastercard doesn’t just enable payments—we’re relentlessly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in commerce,” said Sherri Haymond, co-president of Global Partnerships at Mastercard. “Our work with PayPal is driving a catalyst for agentic innovation at global scale, empowering merchants and consumers to transact with confidence, speed, and trust.”
Both companies said they plan to continue collaborating on future AI-driven payment use cases as agentic commerce matures, building what they describe as a secure foundation for the next generation of digital transactions.