Mastercard bets on agentic commerce as value-added services surge 22%

Mastercard is building infrastructure for AI agents to spend autonomously, betting that tokenized credentials and programmable money will unlock a new wave of payment volume as its value-added services revenue surged 22 percent in the first quarter.

"We are advancing agentic commerce with Mastercard Agent Pay, a framework designed to enable secure AI-driven transactions," Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach said on the company's April 30 earnings call.

Mastercard has already completed a live agentic payment transaction in Hong Kong with PhotonPay, where an AI agent autonomously selected and executed a purchase using tokenized credentials. The company also launched Verifiable Intent, a solution that records and verifies consumer authorization when an AI agent makes a purchase. The push comes as 45 percent of consumers say they are comfortable letting AI agents complete purchases, though 95 percent express at least one concern, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research with Worldpay. Half of U.S. consumers said they would place greater trust in agentic commerce if fraud protections were clearly established.

The strategic prize is control of the token services provider layer, where identity, authorization and payment credentials converge before an AI agent can transact. Mastercard's value-added services and solutions business, which posted 18 percent currency-neutral revenue growth in the first quarter, already provides the fraud monitoring, credential protection and dispute management that agentic commerce requires. The company also partnered with JD.com in May to explore agentic AI-powered purchasing through Mastercard Agent Pay and expand co-branded card initiatives across JD.com's e-commerce platforms.

Tokenization Becomes the Trust Layer for Autonomous Transactions

Tokenization has long operated behind the scenes in e-commerce, replacing card numbers with secure credentials primarily for fraud reduction. Agentic commerce expands that role. A token now serves as a mechanism for establishing identity among parties that may never interact directly — the consumer, the merchant and the AI agent acting on instructions provided hours or days earlier.

Visa is pursuing a parallel strategy, launching Agent Score and Agentic Directory to provide assurance signals around agentic purchases. Both networks are racing to establish themselves as trusted intermediaries between consumers, merchants and autonomous software, according to PYMNTS. The firms that control the authorization layer are not just facilitating agentic commerce — they are building the framework to govern how it operates.

The Investment Case for Programmable Payments

Mastercard reported first-quarter net revenue of $8.40 billion, up 15.8 percent year over year, with adjusted earnings per share of $4.60, a 4.24 percent beat. Value-added services revenue grew 22 percent, outpacing the core payments business. The adjusted operating margin reached 60.8 percent, up from 59.3 percent a year earlier.

The company trades at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 28, with a 14 percent year-to-date pullback offering a sharper entry than Visa's 8 percent decline, according to recent analysis. Analyst price targets imply upside to $645, compared with Visa's $399 target.

The bet on agentic commerce extends beyond consumer payments. Mastercard's planned acquisition of BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider, and its partnership with Stripe and Wizard for AI-driven shopping environments signal that the company sees programmable money as the foundation for the next phase of digital commerce. If AI assistants become the primary interface for shopping, the network that controls the authorization layer will govern how those transactions operate.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.