Mastercard and Rabobank have completed the first AI agent-initiated payment transaction in the Netherlands, using Mastercard Agent Pay.
The transaction was conducted using Mastercard Agent Pay, a framework designed to facilitate secure, AI-initiated purchases while preserving consumer control over authorisation and data access.
In the demonstration, an AI agent processed a booking for a coffee tasting on Priceless.com, Mastercard's experience platform, following a prompt from a consumer. The payment was settled using a Rabobank Mastercard credit card. The agent did not access card data directly, instead, the transaction was secured through Mastercard Payment Passkeys, with consumer consent recorded explicitly prior to execution.
How Agent Pay works
The current consumer journey for AI-assisted shopping typically requires a redirect: an AI assistant surfaces product options, but the user must navigate to an external checkout to complete the purchase. With this in mind, Mastercard Agent Pay is designed to remove that step, enabling payment to be completed within the AI environment itself, whether that assistant is a standalone application or integrated into platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.
Under this model, the AI agent operates strictly within parameters established by the consumer in advance. Purchase confirmation is authenticated via Payment Passkeys, keeping the transaction verifiable and traceable without exposing underlying card credentials to the agent.
Context and strategic direction
The Netherlands transaction is part of Mastercard's broader roadmap towards 2030, in which tokenisation is positioned as a foundational element for securing digital and AI-driven payments at scale. Agent Pay sits within that framework as the mechanism for extending tokenised, consent-based transactions into agentic AI environments.
For Rabobank, participation in the pilot reflects an exploratory approach to AI-integrated financial services, with an emphasis on testing capabilities incrementally alongside technology partners. The Netherlands-based bank has not announced a timeline for broader consumer rollout.
Furthermore, the collaboration signals growing momentum around the infrastructure layer required for AI commerce, specifically, the need for payment networks and issuing banks to establish protocols that govern how AI agents interact with financial credentials, execute transactions, and maintain audit trails that satisfy both consumer protection standards and regulatory expectations.
As AI assistants become more embedded in daily decision-making, the ability to complete purchases without leaving the AI environment is expected to become a competitive differentiator for both technology platforms and financial institutions positioning themselves within that stack.
