Mastercard focuses on ‘Verifiable Intent’ for agentic payments, CDO says

Nearly a year after launching Agent Pay, Mastercard is focused on developing trust to drive adoption. “The first thing is the consumer needs to know that they can trust the interaction,” Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”  “They need to know that if ‘I shop with this agent and something goes wrong, I am protected.’” Agent Pay, announced in April 2025, has now rolled out across Mastercard’s global operations, enabling the company's network of issuing banks to participate in agentic commerce, Fourez says. Central to Mastercard's approach to agentic payments is "Verifiable Intent," a specification the company co-developed with Google and open-sourced through standards bodies including the FIDO Alliance, he says.  Verifiable Intent is an open, standards-based trust layer for agentic commerce that creates a tamper-resistant record of what users authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf, according to a March Mastercard release. Verifiable Intent “helps basically a merchant understand that this is actually an agent that they can trust," Fourez says. Looking ahead, he says next year will bring more autonomous use cases and growth in machine-to-machine payments, including agent-to-agent transactions tied to business-to-business commerce. Listen as Fourez discusses how Mastercard aims to develop and drive adoption of agentic payments.