Europe is Building the Foundations for Trusted Agentic Commerce

Buying the new bike you’ve been thinking about can be easier than it sounds. Many people today are using AI‑powered assistants to narrow down options and find the right fit, whether that’s for city commuting, weekend trails or everyday reliability.

Until recently, that experience would break at the moment of payment. Agentic commerce could help people decide, but not actually pay. That is the gap Mastercard Agent Pay is designed to address. In controlled, consent‑based scenarios, consumers can now authorise an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf, using credentials they already trust.

A year on from announcing Agent Pay, Europe has moved from concept to reality. What was once a theoretical discussion about AI‑initiated transactions is now being proven across markets through real‑world pilots, issuer enablement and ecosystem collaboration.

Today, all Mastercard issuers in Europe are enabled at a network level for Agent Pay. Banks* across Europe have publicly completed controlled, live agentic transactions, using passkeys for authentication. Here, an AI agent completed the transactions on Priceless.com, Mastercard’s global experiences platform, with payOS supporting the end-to-end orchestration.

This is a foundational step, ensuring the ecosystem is ready as AI agents begin to play a more active role in commerce. It means having the right building blocks from the start – from tokenization and authentication to strong consumer consent – bringing visibility and traceability to every transaction. This is further supported by continued investment in innovation across the region, including the recently announced Lisbon Centre of Excellence for Innovation, which will help accelerate the development of next-generation, agent-driven payment experiences.

At the same time, acceptance is evolving. Mastercard together with Worldline and ING performed a live end-to-end fully regionally orchestrated agentic transaction, with all elements of the transaction flow based in Europe. This milestone helps turn readiness into real merchant capability, ensuring that payments initiated by AI agents can be processed transparently and responsibly at scale. It also shows how collaboration across issuers, acquirers and payment service providers can move agentic commerce from isolated pilots to repeatable models.

Each of these milestones builds confidence that agentic payments can work for everyone, consumers, banks and merchants alike.

Trust is central to making this work. Verifiable Intent plays a critical role, ensuring that action taken by an AI agent can be traced back to explicit consumer authorisation, with clear visibility for issuers and strong governance across the flow. This approach is already gaining momentum, with Mastercard working alongside partners like the FIDO Alliance and Google to help advance common frameworks for trusted, user-consented interactions in AI-driven experiences. 

Agentic commerce represents a new chapter in how people interact with digital services. And Europe is helping write it. By combining innovation with accountability, and momentum with discipline, we are laying the groundwork for AI‑driven commerce that can scale responsibly, so that even something like finding and buying the right bike feels simple, safe and firmly under the consumer’s control.

*List of banks that have completed transactions: ABANCA, Alpha Bank Cyprus, Banco Santander, Bank Hapoalim, Bank of Cyprus, Bank PEKAO S.A., BCR (Romanian Commercial Bank), Bunq, Carrefour Banque, Cembra, Cornèrcard, ČSOB Czechia, ČSOB Slovakia, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, Erste Bank Österreich, Eurobank Limited, Eurobank Greece, Isracard, KBC, mBank, N26, National Bank of Greece, Nickel, NLB, OTP Bank, Postbank (Eurobank Bulgaria AD), Raiffeisen Bank Croatia, Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit Bank Austria, UniCredit Bulbank Bulgaria, United Bulgarian Bank (KBC Group), UniCredit Polska, Universo, Viseca, Zagrebačka Bank Croatia