Closing the loop: How Mastercard is building for agentic commerce

Mastercard’s Craig Reiff explains why trust, not technology, will enable this next shift.

Craig Reiff spends much of his time thinking about the consumer and the digital experience that surrounds them.

As Senior Vice President of Core Payments at Mastercard in Canada, he focuses on the systems that power how transactions actually happen.

“Scalability will not be challenged by technology. It’s going to be challenged by trust.”

In a recent conversation with BetaKit, Reiff revealed how Mastercard is adapting that layer of commerce for a new kind of interaction, where AI can take an interaction all the way from decision to purchase. 

“It’s really the next evolution of payments,” Reiff said. 

Over two decades ago, the world first experienced what it meant to shop online. “This is that next evolution,” he added, “moving from online into the world of AI.”

As it stands today, Reiff described generative AI as largely confined to the research phase of a shopper’s experience. It can give people a place to start and help narrow down options, but it stops short of execution.

“Generative AI gives you information, but I still have to go to a store, I have to go buy something online,” Reiff said. “Agentic commerce closes that loop.”

Instead of moving from recommendation to check-out across multiple tabs and steps, the same system that helps a user decide what to buy can carry that intent through to purchase, completing the transaction. 

Reiff sees the first use cases will come in purchases that are common but time-consuming, like planning travel or reordering household supplies. These aren’t decisions most people struggle with, but they take time because the work is in coordinating the details, checking all the available options, and following through. Reiff believes agentic commerce can absorb much of that work.

“It’s really about putting time back in the hands of users and consumers,” he said.

When planning a vacation abroad, for example, a user could tell an AI agent they need to book flights, hotels, excursions and a car rental. The agent can then give them options based on personalized factors like their travel dates, airline loyalty, and hotel preferences. From there, the user can authorize those purchases directly through the AI agent.

With agentic commerce, humans are still providing consent for the purchase, but with the help of AI, they no longer have to spend hours piecing the whole process together.

“Humans are setting the control and the authorization of everything,” Reiff added. “It’s, as we say: AI-assisted, human-led.”

At the inaugural Mastercard Innovation Forum in Canada in April, over 500 industry leaders and innovators gathered to explore how Canada can advance what is possible in the digital economy, cybersecurity and payments technology – including agentic commerce. The forum’s theme, Forward, Together, reflected a clear consensus that the next era will be led by organizations that lean into industry collaboration and turn data into an advantage responsibly, reliably, and in real time.

As agentic systems become more prominent for users and businesses around the world, Mastercard’s Chief Innovation Officer, Ken Moore, led a key conversation about agentic commerce at the Forum.

“[When] you give permission to an agent to act on your behalf, you’re actually creating a new threat surface, a new threat vector,” Moore said at the forum. “But we should also understand that in that threat, there are also opportunities.”

He noted that AI can parse signals, spot patterns that humans can’t see, respond in real time, and perhaps most importantly, take action and stop threats. But AI’s capabilities alone aren’t what will determine adoption. 

“The technologies exist today,” Moore added. “Really, the challenge is more about engineering trust into the ecosystem.”

Moore called trust “the currency of innovation,” and according to Reiff, winning the hearts and minds of users and businesses depends on whether they feel confident that the systems will do exactly what they expect.

“Trust is the fundamental component,” Reiff continued. “Scalability will not be challenged by technology. It’s going to be challenged by trust.”

“The technologies exist today. Really, the challenge is more about engineering trust into the ecosystem.”

The experience with Mastercard Agent Pay won’t be much different from what users expect with any other online purchase. Transactions will still run between a consumer and a merchant, with the financial institutions and Mastercard—the payment network—handling the exchange. But in an agentic model, the agent sits in the middle of that infrastructure, acting with clearly defined instructions. 

Mastercard Agent Pay also works on the same payment rails and security standards already used today. The service uses tokenization, a process that replaces sensitive details with secure tokens. In agentic commerce, tokens also carry information about whether an AI agent is legitimate, and context about purchase intent and user consent.

Consistency is also key to agentic commerce. The company wants to ensure users in Canada and globally can expect a consistent, predictable shopping experience, regardless of the AI agent they’re using.

Reiff expects agentic commerce to follow a similar adoption curve to other significant payments innovations. 

“Even when we go back to the world of online shopping, it took time for consumers to be comfortable making those transactions,” he said. “[Is] my payment information going to be safe? That was a big topic of conversation early. Fast forward all these years, it’s taken for granted.”

In Canada, the work on Mastercard Agent Pay is still in the early build phase, which means just as much time is being spent on education as infrastructure. Merchants, financial institutions, and consumers need to understand what it means to hand off part of a transaction flow to AI, and that’s where Mastercard is currently focused in Canada.

Reiff sees agentic commerce as an extension of the systems that Mastercard has built, and that consumers have trusted for decades. 

“We built trust before the world of e-commerce; it was trust in face-to-face transactions,” Reiff said. “That was extended into the world of e-commerce.”

Mastercard wants to bring that same trust and same infrastructure to the world of agentic commerce.

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Mastercard is bringing agentic commerce into the real world through embedded, trusted payments. Learn more.

Feauture image courtesy Uptown Media.