Mastercard's Agent Connect, Visa's 23% trust gap drive agentic commerce push

The push into agentic commerce comes as payment companies try to address concerns that AI agents might act outside their instructions. Mastercard's response has been concrete: Agent Connect and an expanded Agent Suite for Merchants are meant to give businesses a way to support agentic shopping and make products discoverable across AI ecosystems, while a separate product, Agent Pay, uses Verifiable Intent to bind an agent's actions to what the user actually authorized.

Visa has taken a parallel path, releasing research in early September that found only 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payments on their behalf, and offering its own tools such as Trusted Agent Protocol and Intelligent Commerce Connect. Both card networks are now also collaborating with Ant International on a know-your-agent framework designed to trace agents back to a validated operator and assess them against security and behavioral requirements.

Not everyone thinks identity checks alone will be enough. Louis Hoch, CEO of payments company Usio, argues that knowing an agent is legitimate does not guarantee it is doing what the customer asked, and suggests a separate digital wallet for AI agents with a set spending limit as one option. How quickly agentic commerce scales may therefore hinge less on whether agents can be identified and more on whether merchants, banks and consumers get clear answers on spending limits, real-time shutoff, and who is responsible when an agent buys the wrong thing.