The Fiserv-Mastercard Strategy in Agentic Commerce and Agentic Payments

Fiserv and Mastercard have expanded their partnership to operationalize agentic commerce at scale, positioning Fiserv as one of the first major processors to adopt Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework. This move establishes a critical infrastructure on-ramp for agentic payments, allowing AI agents to initiate transactions through secure, programmable rails. The partnership builds on previous collaborations regarding stablecoin adoption and small business tooling, signaling a shift toward a machine-to-machine economy. Technically, Fiserv will integrate with Mastercard’s Secure Card on File service to act as a network token requestor. This allows AI agents to transact using network tokens instead of raw PANs, applying background governance, fraud controls, and strong authentication to every autonomous session. The Agent Pay Acceptance Framework provides a reference architecture that enables AI agents to checkout on a customer’s behalf while ensuring merchants maintain direct control over the customer relationship and revenue streams. The term ‘agentic commerce‘ was originally coined in 2024 by StartupHub.ai’s Daniel Singer to describe looming capability of AI Agents to transact online with businesses, or with other AI Agents (A2A). As the sector matures, a competitive “network war” has emerged. Visa recently launched its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) to help merchants distinguish “trusted” AI agents from malicious bots. While Mastercard and Fiserv focus on the processor-side payment governance, Visa’s TAP operates at the session layer, allowing agents to pass identity and risk signals to avoid being blocked by merchant bot-defense systems. Parallel to the card networks, digital-native platforms are building the settlement layers for these agents. Coinbase has pioneered “AI Wallets,” enabling autonomous agents to hold and spend USDC on-chain via the Base network. Stripe has introduced agent-initiated payment support and usage-based billing for LLM-to-LLM transactions, while PayPal is utilizing its PYUSD stablecoin to facilitate high-velocity machine-to-machine (M2M) payments and micropayments. The ecosystem is further supported by a growing cast of startups and consortia seeking neutral standards. Basis Theory recently secured a $33 million Series B to expand its processor-agnostic vault and leads the Agentic Commerce Consortium, a group of over 20 companies designing interoperable standards for “trusted buyers.” Together with the Fiserv-Mastercard alliance and Visa’s TAP, these organizations are defining the security, identity, and tokenization rules for the next trillion dollars of autonomous digital commerce.