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Having launched Mastercard Agent Suite in January, the card brand is expanding the service to make it easier for merchants to create and deploy AI-enabled shopping experiences. It also is launching Mastercard Agent Connect, a service that helps merchants, AI agents, platforms, and payment providers connect and transact via a single integration.
Agent Suite debuted as a technical support aid with customizable AI agents and access to Mastercard’s AI consulting. It now offers new shopping-agent capabilities and access to Agent Connect.
Agent Suite will use collaborations with AI platforms, too. In one example, the Anthropic commerce agent blueprint will be made available to merchants through Agent Suite to help them build shopping agents with Claude models that integrate Mastercard’s portfolio of payments, transaction, and personalization services.
Agent Connect can simplify the web of integrations it takes to enable agentic commerce, Mastercard says. One way it does this is by making the plethora of merchant-defined information, such as product details, pricing, availability, and fulfillment options, available across models, platforms, and agents, Mastercard says.
Another piece of Agent Connect is its ability to help AI agents move through the discovery, recommendation, and transaction phases of an agentic shopping purchase, Mastercard says. Companies such as Global Payments Inc., Samsung, and Trip.com will adopt Mastercard Agent Connect, it says.
In related news, Mastercard, Visa Inc., and Ant International have begun work on a shared know-your-agent interoperability framework. This should help card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms, and marketplaces ease agent onboarding and identification across networks.
Each company previously launched its own protocols while this shared framework will work towards common principles, Ant says. Ant is perhaps best known as the parent company of Alipay+, a cross-border mobile-payment service.
The work on the know-your-agent protocol will focus on enabling each agent to be linked to a validated operator, cardholder, or business so clear attribution of agent activity is visible. It also will develop shared certification requirements and govern continuous transaction monitoring.
“Interoperable KYA between card and wallet networks is critical for securing trust for our payment partners, platforms, and merchants in agentic commerce,” Jiang-Ming Yang, Ant International chief innovation officer, says in a statement.
