Inside Mastercard’s Agentic AI Strategy For The $80 Trillion B2B Payments Market

Before a company pays a supplier, its finance team has to match what was ordered, invoiced, and delivered across systems that rarely talk to each other. The terms matter too. The business may have agreed to pay only once the goods arrive, or timed the payment to land after its own customers pay. Hand that job to an AI agent and a new kind of error appears. The agent could stay within budget yet release the money before delivery, leaving the company chasing a refund if the supplier never ships.

A valid card credential tells a bank the agent was allowed to spend, but says nothing about whether the AI agent did what the buyer asked.

Mastercard sees a business opportunity in that gap. The payments giant wants to help companies use their financial data to decide how to pay suppliers, while giving banks and merchants more context to assess transactions that software initiates.

The company is attacking that gap from both ends: the decision to pay and the decision to approve. Advanced B2B Analytics helps banks identify suppliers likely to accept card payments, giving issuers a way to capture more of the $80 trillion addressable B2B payments market Mastercard estimates. Likewise, Agent Pay intelligence services support authorization decisions by supplying banks and merchants with additional signals about purchases that AI agents initiate.

Marc Pettican, Mastercard’s executive vice president and global head of corporate solutions, sees agentic AI as the next step in the company’s decades-long effort to digitize commercial payments.

Kaushik Gopal, the company’s executive vice president of business and market insights, says many organizations still struggle to turn promising AI experiments into systems they can depend on in everyday operations.

Building Intelligence and Trust Into AI Agent Payments

That $80 trillion estimate describes the broader addressable B2B payments market, rather than spending that AI agents already control.