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The bots are coming for checkout
Mastercard isn’t just watching the AI wave from the shore — it’s helping write the surfboard manual. Google and Mastercard are contributing standards to the FIDO Alliance for what they call agentic commerce, which is a fancy way of saying: how do we let AI agents prove who they are, make decisions, and complete transactions without turning the internet into a scam buffet?
Why this matters for Mastercard
If this stuff catches on, payments get a new front door. Instead of you manually clicking “buy,” an assistant could handle the whole thing. That’s good news for networks like Mastercard, because the company wants its rails to be part of the plumbing no matter who — human or chatbot — is doing the spending.
The real game here
This is less about a revenue pop today and more about position-taking. Mastercard is trying to make sure its brand shows up in the standards conversation before the standards become the law of the land. In tech, that’s often how you avoid waking up one day and realizing someone else built the toll booth.
Big picture
For investors, the move is a reminder that payments companies aren’t just card issuers anymore. They’re trying to become the trust layer for whatever weird new checkout experience AI invents next. And if agentic commerce goes mainstream, being early in the standards room could matter more than a flashy product demo.