Mastercard has introduced Agent Connect, a new solution designed to help merchants, AI agents, digital platforms, and payment providers connect and transact through a single integration.
The announcement accompanies an expansion of Mastercard Agent Suite for Merchants, first introduced in January 2026, which allows businesses to bring agent-powered shopping experiences, including product discovery, research, and consumer-authorised purchases, into their existing e-commerce environments. Together, the two offerings are intended to help merchants participate in AI-powered commerce while retaining control over how their products are represented and how transactions are authorised.
Expanding the merchant offering
With the addition of shopping agent capabilities and access to Agent Connect, Agent Suite for Merchants is designed to help businesses prepare product information for AI discovery and connect with participating third-party agents. Merchants can also access Mastercard Agent Pay to support secure agentic transactions. In addition, the expanded suite builds on collaborations with AI platforms, including Anthropic, whose commerce agent blueprint will be made available to merchants through Agent Suite for Merchants. This is intended to allow businesses to build shopping agents using Claude models integrated with Mastercard's commerce intelligence, controls, personalisation, and payments capabilities on their own websites or apps.
Product discoverability across AI platforms
As consumers increasingly use AI-powered assistants to discover and compare products, Agent Suite for Merchants allows businesses to make merchant-defined information, including product details, pricing, availability, and fulfilment options, accessible across models, platforms, and agent experiences while maintaining control over how that information is used. According to Mastercard, businesses and commerce platforms, including Castlery, Fabrick, Fiserv, FreedomPay, Getnet, Global Payments, Moneris, Nexi, Network International, Trip.com, and Worldline plan to use Agent Suite for Merchants.
Agent Connect is designed to simplify integration as agentic commerce expands across platforms and providers, giving merchants a single connection point to participating agents, commerce services, and payment providers while retaining control over pricing, fulfilment, customer relationships, and business rules. Through Agent Connect, participating agents are intended to move across three stages: discovering merchant product catalogue information, recommending products and confirming final pricing, taxes, shipping costs, and fulfilment details, and completing transactions using secure payment credentials from any network.
Transactions using Mastercard can additionally be secured through Mastercard Agent Pay, which applies Verifiable Intent to support consumer-authorised purchases. At the same time, the company has said agents may in future also benefit from network-agnostic tokenisation functionality.
Rollout and industry context
Agent Connect will launch first in the US, with companies and platforms including Bemobi, Getnet, Glance, Global Payments, Planet, Network International, Nexi, Samsung, Trip.com, Vodafone Egypt, Wizard, and Wompi expected to use the solution. Mastercard said Agent Connect is expected to evolve over time, subject to market needs and product availability.
Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, said AI agents are set to change the commerce interface, shifting activity from search and discovery towards checkout and dispute handling, and that the company aims to help merchants prepare while maintaining control through established principles of trust, interoperability, security, and reach. Mastercard said it will continue working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI developers to explore how merchant-authorised commerce experiences can develop as agentic commerce evolves.
