Mastercard unveils trust layer for agentic commerce

Called Verifiable Intent, the layer creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorised when an AI agent acts on their behalf, establishing a shared source of truth across the ecosystem.

Designed to be agnostic to existing protocols like Google’s Agent Payments Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol, it promises to provide cryptographic proof of authorisation that consumers, merchants, and issuers can rely on.

Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer, Mastercard, says: "As AI agents take on more responsibility, payments become a reflection of trust. In this new payments paradigm, consumers want more than efficiency. They want confidence, accountability, and reassurance that someone has their back when AI acts on their behalf.

“Verifiable Intent is built to deliver on that promise. When integrated into Mastercard Agent Pay, it serves as the heart of a system providing clear proof of authorization, accountability, and recourse. As commerce becomes more autonomous, trust won’t take a backseat. It will matter even more.”

Verifiable Intent will, over the next few months, be integrated directly into Mastercard Agent Pay’s intent APIs to drive real-world adoption with partners.

It is built on widely adopted specifications from the Fido Alliance, EMVCo, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. It is designed to work across agentic protocols, devices, wallets, platforms and even other payments networks.

Mastercard has open-sourced the Verifiable Intent specification and an initial reference implementation on GitHub. Agent platforms, payment and checkout enablers, merchants, and developers are being invited to review, contribute, and build. API specifications and developer tools for using Verifiable Intent with Mastercard Agent Pay will follow.

Big names, including Google, IBM and Checkout.com are backing the effort. Stavan Parikh, GM, payments, Google, says: “Strong, interoperable trust infrastructure like Verifiable Intent that is compatible with Agent Payments Protocol is a natural accelerator for scaling agentic commerce, and we’re proud to have collaborated with Mastercard on this initiative.”