Mastercard today announced Merchant Cloud, a next-generation payments platform that unifies market-leading services from Mastercard and its partners, helping businesses simplify and navigate the complexities of commerce around the world, supporting their expansion into new markets and delivering exceptional experiences for end users.

The platform offers scheme-agnostic solutions for credential tokenization, guest checkout, fraud protection, identity verification, and approval rate optimization. It also provides customers with a variety of gateway services, such as omnichannel experiences, efficient transaction routing, and access to data insights.

Combined with dedicated support and easy onboarding, the platform is designed to simplify the life of every partner to easily access the services they need to grow their businesses safely and securely, in an AI enabled world.

Merchant Cloud will provide merchants with the capability to conduct agentic payments securely, integrating into Mastercard Agent Pay and implementing the latest agentic payments protocols. Merchant partners can leverage this capability to provide consumers with a seamless and trusted agentic shopping experience.

Merchants can tailor a suite of services to improve their optimization performance, including fraud screening services and account lifecycle updates.

Additionally, Merchant Cloud incorporates AI to streamline shopping and to help improve approval rates. Our latest offering, Payment Optimization Platform (POP), uses Mastercard’s network intelligence and will soon use AI to provide optimal authorization messages and deliver insights that drive more approvals.

Mastercard's Security Solutions within Merchant Cloud include advanced cyber, identity, and AI fraud monitoring tools designed to identify fraudulent merchants, providing risk scores to acquirers, payment service providers and payment facilitators. The Transaction Risk API analyzes client-provided data to provide payment operations teams with risk scores and actionable insights to manage global fraud and enhance customer experience.

With worldwide connectivity to over 240 acquirers and support for more than 35 payment types, including alternative payment methods, global and domestic wallets, domestic schemes, and global card networks, merchant partners can access services that boost acceptance of more transaction types, driving additional sales and enhancing consumer choice.

Gaurang Shah, executive vice president, Global Acceptance & Merchant Solutions at Mastercard said, “With Mastercard Merchant Cloud, commerce is truly simplified through a unified, scalable, secure, and open infrastructure — one that not only supports the needs of merchant partners today with data, services and insights, but is also designed to anticipate the future of digital and agent-driven commerce.”

The new unified acceptance platform has been designed to simplify growth for the entire merchant value chain – from Acquirers and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) and Payment Facilitators (PayFac) to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Merchants themselves – with streamlined access to a dynamic, modular set of services.