How does Mastercard use AI across its payment ecosystem?
Mastercard runs AI at each step of a payment and sells most of it to banks and merchants as services. At authorisation, Decision Intelligence scores Mastercard's 159 billion transactions a year for fraud (June 2025), and Decision Intelligence Pro, announced in February 2024, added generative AI. On real-time account-to-account payments, Consumer Fraud Risk went live with nine UK banks in July 2023; by July 2025, 15 banks representing 90% of UK account-to-account payments used it. For approvals, the Payment Optimization Platform, unveiled on October 13, 2025, showed a 9% to 15% rise in conversions in pilots, with AI to be added after the pilot. Mastercard Threat Intelligence, launched October 27, 2025, joins network fraud data with Recorded Future, bought for $2.7 billion. For AI agents, Agent Pay was enabled for all U.S. Mastercard cardholders in 2025, with a global launch scheduled for early 2026. Mastercard says its AI-enabled Safety Net has prevented $77 billion in fraud losses since 2020. Partners on the record include Databricks, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Cloudflare. Mastercard does not report revenue from AI products separately.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
Data as of Oct 19, 2026 · Mastercard profile updated Oct 19, 2026 · 34 sources cited on this page · 52 fintechs profiled on this site · Markdown
Where in the payment flow does Mastercard use AI?
One row per layer, with Mastercard's product name and the latest dated figure Mastercard has published for it. Results are Mastercard's own measurements unless stated.
| Layer | Product | What the record shows | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authorisation fraud scoring | Decision Intelligence | Helps protect customers and cardholders from fraud across Mastercard's 159 billion transactions per year (143 billion in the February 2024 release) | June 23, 2025[1][2] |
| Generative AI in fraud scoring | Decision Intelligence Pro | Scans one trillion data points and returns a score in under 50 milliseconds; initial modelling showed fraud detection up 20% on average | February 1, 2024[2] |
| Real-time account-to-account scams | Consumer Fraud Risk | Live with nine UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, NatWest, Monzo and TSB; Mastercard said TSB's results, mirrored by all UK banks, would equate to almost £100 million of scam payments prevented a year | July 6, 2023[3] |
| Mule accounts at the receiving bank | Consumer Fraud Risk, inbound risk alerts | 11 UK banks using the tool since early 2023; offline tests of inbound alerts showed a 60% average improvement in finding high-risk mule accounts early | September 2024[14] |
| Account-to-account scoring at scale | Consumer Fraud Risk | 15 banks representing 90% of UK account-to-account payments use it; Mastercard says it played a key role in reducing the number of APP fraud cases in 2024 by 20% | July 28, 2025[4] |
| AI-powered decisioning results | Fraud scoring (as reported on the Q1 2025 call) | AI-powered decisioning detected 40% more payments fraud than in the first quarter of 2024, per PYMNTS' report of the call | May 1, 2025[15] |
| Network-level attack defense | Safety Net | AI-enabled; Mastercard says it has prevented $77 billion in fraud losses since 2020. In one 2023 incident it detected more than 2,300 suspicious transactions per hour over three days and blocked $14.7 million of fraud | July 15, 2026[8][16] |
| Merchant (acquirer) fraud screening | Brighterion | Network International extended Brighterion's AI fraud prevention to over 60,000 merchants | March 20, 2024[17] |
| Compromised-card reissuance | Account Intelligence Reissuance | AI-driven recommendations on which cards to monitor or replace; launched in EEMEA, with Asia Pacific, North America and Latin America planned later in 2025 | June 23, 2025[1] |
| Approval rates | Payment Optimization Platform | Enriches authorisation messages, evaluating over a trillion combinations of data elements; pilots showed a 9% to 15% increase in conversions; AI capabilities to be integrated shortly after pilot | October 13, 2025[5] |
| Threat intelligence | Mastercard Threat Intelligence | Combines Mastercard fraud insights with Recorded Future threat intelligence; in six months of market testing it found malicious domains that had hit nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites, linked to an estimated $120 million in fraud | October 27, 2025[6] |
How far has Mastercard taken AI agents into its network?
The profile covers Agent Pay's launch, Verifiable Intent and Agent Pay for Machines; these rows add the rollout and standards record.
| Item | What happened | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Agent Pay rollout | All U.S.-based Mastercard cardholders enabled in 2025, with a global launch scheduled for early 2026, per the FY2025 10-K | February 11, 2026[7] |
| Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) | Mastercard named among more than 60 organisations collaborating on Google's protocol at launch | September 16, 2025[11] |
| Checkout integrations | Agent Pay being integrated into Microsoft's Copilot Checkout and OpenAI's Instant Checkout in ChatGPT; Start Path rebuilt around AI payment, identity and intent-verification startups | January 20, 2026[12] |
| Universal Commerce Protocol | Mastercard says it joined forces with Google on its Universal Commerce Protocol | January 20, 2026[18] |
| Verifiable Intent to FIDO | Google donates AP2 to the FIDO Alliance; Verifiable Intent, co-developed with Mastercard, is also being donated | April 28, 2026[19] |
| Agent Pay for Machines users | More than 30 users at launch, including Adyen, Checkout.com, Coinbase and Cloudflare | July 30, 2026[20] |
| Know Your Agent | Skyfire, from Start Path's first Agentic Commerce & Services cohort, is extending its Know Your Agent technology into Agent Pay | October 8, 2026[21] |
| Rogue-agent controls | CTO Ed McLaughlin: "even if the agent goes rogue and tries to do something, you can say no" | October 12, 2026[22] |
Who does Mastercard work with on AI?
| Partner | What | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Databricks | Gen AI knowledge-agent capability built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform; first use a product-onboarding assistant using a large language model with retrieval augmented generation | October 29, 2024[9] |
| Nvidia and Databricks | Large tabular foundation model trained on billions of anonymized transactions | March 17, 2026[10] |
| Salesforce | Partnership to support payment dispute resolution, part of Mastercard's gen AI strategy, per American Banker | May 2024[23] |
| AP2 collaborator (2025); Verifiable Intent co-developed and donated to FIDO (2026) | 2025–2026[11][19] | |
| Microsoft and OpenAI | Agent Pay in Copilot Checkout and ChatGPT Instant Checkout | January 20, 2026[12][24] |
| Cloudflare | Recorded Future and RiskRecon attack-surface monitoring paired with Cloudflare's Application Security portfolio | February 17, 2026[13] |
| UK banks | Nine banks at the Consumer Fraud Risk launch, 11 by September 2024, 15 representing 90% of UK account-to-account payments by July 2025; Monzo, NatWest and Santander on A2A Protect | 2023–2025[3][14][4] |
| Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments, Worldpay | Rolling out the Payment Optimization Platform | October 13, 2025[5] |
How does AI fit Mastercard's business, and what does it not disclose?
AI sits in Mastercard's services business, not in a separate line. The FY2025 10-K says Mastercard uses its data with "an ever-increasing range of AI, including machine learning, natural-language processing, neural networks and generative AI", lists advanced analytics and AI solutions among its services, and names technology companies offering AI-based cyber and fraud solutions among its competitors.[7]
At its November 13, 2024 investment community meeting Mastercard set a target of high-teens growth in value-added services and solutions net revenue for 2025 to 2027, and its data slide cited 15+ petabytes of data and "Artificial Intelligence deployed at scale".[25]
The 10-K also lists the risks: as a user and deployer of AI it is subject to laws including the EU AI Act, and AI algorithms "may generate inaccurate, unintended, unfair, biased or discriminatory outcomes".[7]
What is not disclosed: revenue from AI products, Decision Intelligence Pro results after the February 2024 initial modelling (American Banker reported a 20% average improvement since May 2024, attributed to Mastercard), the Payment Optimization Platform's results once AI is added, and agentic transaction volumes.[7][2][23][5]
What does the Mastercard profile record on this topic?
The rows below are the entries of the Mastercard AI strategy profile that bear on this page, as of Oct 19, 2026; the profile holds the full record of 16 dated moves, 9 use cases and 23 sources.
| Use case | What the record shows | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mastercard Agent Pay | Agentic Tokens and agent registration let verified AI agents pay within consumer-set limits; enabled for all European issuers and used in controlled live transactions, with B2B agentic transactions live in Asia Pacific markets. | Rolling out | [26][24][27][28] |
| Agent Pay for Machines | Credentialing, programmatic spending limits and guaranteed multi-rail settlement for high-frequency, low-value payments between agents and services. | Announced | [29] |
| Decision Intelligence Pro | Generative-AI enhancement to real-time transaction fraud scoring that assesses relationships between entities around a payment; Mastercard reports a 20% average improvement in fraud detection from initial modelling. | Announced | [2] |
| Recorded Future and Mastercard Threat Intelligence | AI-driven threat intelligence from Recorded Future, combined with Mastercard's network visibility in a threat-intelligence service launched in 2025 to detect cyberattacks that lead to payment fraud. | In production | [30][7] |
| Large tabular foundation model | Transaction foundation model trained on billions of anonymized transactions with Nvidia and Databricks; being tested for hybrid cybersecurity and fraud systems and to reduce the thousands of separate models Mastercard maintains. | Pilot | [10] |
| Agentic transaction probability score | A new Agent Pay signal, rolling out for testing in the US, estimates the likelihood that a transaction was initiated by an AI agent so issuers can approve legitimate agent-led purchases with more confidence; built with a Cloudflare data partnership and Skyfire's Know-Your-Agent verification. | Pilot | [31] |
| Date | Move | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 30, 2026 | Agent Pay Trust Framework and new trust and intelligence services | Mastercard published a "Trust for agentic commerce" white paper introducing the Mastercard Agent Pay Trust Framework (five pillars: identity, intent, controls, trusted execution and intelligence) and added new trust and intelligence services to Agent Pay: a probability score estimating whether a transaction was AI-initiated, rolling out for testing in the US, plus a privacy-preserving data partnership with Cloudflare and a partnership with Skyfire to extend Know-Your-Agent verification into Agent Pay. Ann Johnson, EVP of Security Solutions, said "AI agents will make commerce more intuitive, efficient and personal — but only if people and businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf." | [31][32] |
| Jun 10, 2026 | Agent Pay for Machines launched | A service for permissioned, orchestrated and settled machine-to-machine payments, some fractions of a cent, across cards, accounts and stablecoins, with more than 30 initial participants including Adyen, Coinbase, Stripe and Cloudflare. | [29] |
| Jun 2, 2026 | All European issuers enabled for Agent Pay | Mastercard says all its issuers in Europe are enabled at network level for Agent Pay and that banks across Europe have completed controlled, live agentic transactions using passkeys. | [27] |
| Mar 17, 2026 | Large tabular foundation model disclosed | Mastercard describes a generative foundation model trained on billions of anonymized transactions with Nvidia and Databricks; early tests beat standard machine-learning techniques on rare legitimate purchases, and cybersecurity is the first target. | [10] |
| Mar 5, 2026 | Verifiable Intent open-sourced with Google | Mastercard introduces Verifiable Intent, co-developed with Google and aligned with Google's AP2 and UCP protocols, as an open specification and reference implementation on GitHub, providing cryptographic proof of what a user authorized an agent to buy. | [33] |
| Mar 2, 2026 | Europe's first live end-to-end agent payment with Santander | Banco Santander completes a payment executed by an AI agent through its live payments infrastructure using Mastercard Agent Pay, in a controlled environment; the companies say it does not constitute a commercial rollout. | [34] |
| Sep 30, 2025 | Agent Pay usable in ChatGPT Instant Checkout | With OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, Agent Pay and Agentic Tokens can be used on OpenAI's platform; Citi and U.S. Bank cardholders are enabled, with all U.S. Mastercard cardholders due by mid-November 2025. | [24] |
| Apr 29, 2025 | Mastercard Agent Pay launches | Mastercard launches its Agentic Payments Program with Agentic Tokens, registration and verification of AI agents, and a collaboration with Microsoft (Azure OpenAI Service, Copilot Studio); IBM, Braintree and Checkout.com are named partners. | [26] |
| Dec 20, 2024 | Recorded Future acquisition completes | Mastercard completes its purchase of Recorded Future, adding AI-driven threat intelligence to its cybersecurity, identity and fraud-scoring services; the FY2025 10-K puts the cash consideration at $2.7 billion. | [30][7] |
| Feb 1, 2024 | Decision Intelligence Pro announced | Mastercard applies generative AI to its Decision Intelligence fraud-scoring service, which already scores 143 billion transactions a year; DI Pro scans one trillion data points and returns a score in under 50 milliseconds. Mastercard says initial modelling shows fraud detection up 20% on average. | [2] |
What is Mastercard Decision Intelligence?
Decision Intelligence is Mastercard's real-time fraud-scoring service, applied at authorisation. A June 2025 Mastercard release says it helps protect customers across Mastercard's 159 billion transactions a year. Decision Intelligence Pro, announced in February 2024, adds generative AI that scans one trillion data points; Mastercard's initial modelling showed fraud detection up 20% on average.
How does Mastercard fight real-time payment scams with AI?
With Consumer Fraud Risk, which scores account-to-account payments for scam risk before the money leaves the victim's account. It launched with nine UK banks in July 2023; in September 2024 Mastercard added inbound alerts for receiving banks that improved early mule-account detection by 60% on average in offline tests, and by July 2025, 15 banks representing 90% of UK account-to-account payments used it.
Does Mastercard use AI to raise approval rates?
Yes. The Payment Optimization Platform, unveiled on October 13, 2025, enriches authorisation messages with Mastercard data and evaluates over a trillion data combinations per decision. Early pilots showed a 9% to 15% increase in conversions, with Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments and Worldpay partnering; Mastercard said AI capabilities would be integrated shortly after the pilot.
Which AI companies does Mastercard partner with?
On the record: Databricks (a gen AI onboarding assistant in October 2024, and with Nvidia a transaction foundation model in March 2026), Google (the Agent Payments Protocol and Verifiable Intent), Microsoft and OpenAI (Agent Pay in Copilot Checkout and ChatGPT Instant Checkout), Cloudflare (cyber defense, February 2026) and Salesforce on payment disputes.
How much fraud does Mastercard's AI prevent?
Mastercard's July 2026 impact report says its AI-enabled Safety Net has prevented $77 billion in fraud losses since 2020. In July 2023 it said its AI-powered cybersecurity solutions had stopped over $35 billion in fraud losses in the previous three years. These are Mastercard's own figures; no independent measure is published.
- Mastercard steps up fraud prevention efforts with launch of Account Intelligence Reissuance service in EEMEA
- Mastercard supercharges consumer protection with gen AI
- Mastercard leverages its AI capabilities to fight real-time payment scams
- Prevent, Protect and Recover: Mastercard strengthens trust in Account-to-Account payments
- Mastercard Payment Optimization Platform uses the power of data to drive more approvals
- Mastercard Introduces First-Ever Threat Intelligence Solution to Combat Payment Fraud at Scale
- Mastercard Incorporated Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025
- Beyond one billion: Inside the journey to a more inclusive and sustainable economy (2025 Impact Report)
- Mastercard launches new gen AI digital assistant capabilities to enhance customer value
- Meet Mastercard's new generative AI model
- Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
- Mastercard moves to shape AI shopping as agents reach checkout
- Cloudflare and Mastercard Partner to Extend Comprehensive Cyber Defense Across Critical Infrastructure and Small Businesses
- Mastercard expands first-of-its-kind AI technology to help banks protect more consumers from scams in real time
- Mastercard Move Transactions Grow 35%, CEO Says Consumer Spending 'Solid'
- Banks are getting the upper hand on card fraud but social scams getting worse, Mastercard says
- Network International leverages Mastercard's AI-powered Brighterion solution to protect over 60,000 merchants from fraud
- The new rules of the road for agentic commerce
- We're donating Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance
- How Mastercard plans to compete in agentic commerce
- An age-old question for the AI era: Can I see some ID?
- What happens if a rogue AI agent goes on a spending spree? Mastercard is preparing for that risk
- How Mastercard's gen AI 'agents' onboard customers
- Making agentic AI commerce a reality with embedded, trusted payments
- Mastercard 2024 Investment Community Meeting (presentation)
- Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology to power commerce in the age of AI
- Europe is Building the Foundations for Trusted Agentic Commerce
- Ushering in the intelligence layer
- Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines to unlock super-fast, always-on payments
- Mastercard finalizes acquisition of Recorded Future
- Mastercard advances agentic commerce with new trust and intelligence services
- What is agentic commerce trust? Inside Mastercard's new framework
- When AI starts buying for you, trust becomes the product
- Santander and Mastercard complete Europe's first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent
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