What Visa Intelligent Commerce is
Visa Intelligent Commerce is Visa program for letting AI agents pay with a Visa credential inside an agent experience. First announced in April 2025, it expanded in June 2026 with Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration through the Visa Acceptance Platform that gives merchants, agent builders and payment enablers one place to plug in. It handles payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls and authentication. The design choice Visa is pushing hardest is breadth of interoperability: Intelligent Commerce Connect supports payments initiated through four agent protocols (the Trusted Agent Protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol, the Agentic Commerce Protocol and the Universal Commerce Protocol) and can route transactions across both Visa and non-Visa cards. Visa also plugged its network into ChatGPT in June 2026, so an agent can complete a purchase at any Visa-accepting merchant. The credential an agent receives is a Visa-tokenized, merchant-specific token with scoped permissions, so a token minted for a flight is only usable with that airline for that trip window. Visa has since added an agent-identity layer and developer tooling around it; our deep dive on what Visa Intelligent Commerce actually ships covers the Trusted Agent Protocol, Intelligent Commerce Connect and the VIC APIs in full. American Express is the third network in this race, and it took a different route: its invite-only ACE kit writes the spending amount into each agent purchase intent and backs registered agent mistakes with a named protection, which we measured on our American Express agentic commerce page.
What Mastercard Agent Pay is
Mastercard Agent Pay is Mastercard agentic payments program, announced in April 2025 and built on Mastercard Agentic Tokens. Those tokens extend the same tokenization that already powers contactless, secure card-on-file and Payment Passkeys, so the trust model is familiar to issuers. Citi and US Bank were the first issuing banks to support it, with the program expanding through 2026. In June 2026 Mastercard added Agent Pay for Machines, a service that lets AI agents and connected systems pay one another automatically across the network, with some payments as small as fractions of a cent. Mastercard leaned into ecosystem breadth on the settlement side: more than 30 partners signed on, including Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, Cloudflare, OKX, Ripple, Polygon and Solana, and settlement is supported across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins. Where Visa is emphasizing one integration across many protocols, Mastercard is emphasizing many rails a machine payment can settle over. Mastercard also co-developed the Verifiable Intent standard with Google and donated it to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026, alongside Google's donation of the Agent Payments Protocol, so the same tokens are expected to travel with signed proof of what the buyer authorized.
Where the two programs actually differ
On the fundamentals they rhyme. Both are card-network programs, both replace raw card numbers with scoped agentic tokens, both launched their agentic effort in April 2025, and both shipped machine-to-machine capabilities on the same day in June 2026. The differences are in emphasis. Visa Intelligent Commerce is positioned as one integration that speaks four agent protocols and reaches any Visa-accepting merchant, which is attractive if your priority is checkout coverage across the open standards. Mastercard Agent Pay is positioned around agent-to-agent settlement and a wide set of partners and settlement rails including stablecoins, which is attractive if your priority is machines paying machines for API calls, data and compute at high frequency. Neither is a walled garden: both can touch non-native cards, and both intend to interoperate with the emerging protocol stack rather than replace it.
What both networks give you, and what neither does
Both programs solve the credential problem well. An agent no longer needs a real card number pasted into a config file; it gets a token scoped to a merchant, an amount or a window, which is a genuine security upgrade. What neither program solves is the buy-side decision. Visa and Mastercard tell a merchant how to accept an agent payment and how to tokenize it. They do not tell the company whose agents are doing the buying which agent may spend, up to what amount, with which counterparties, how often, and who has to approve above a threshold. That is not a gap in their design; it is out of scope by design, because those are your policies, not the network policies. The risk is that a protocol-compliant, correctly tokenized transaction can still be a purchase you never wanted, made by an agent that looped on a retry, misread a quantity, or was steered by prompt injection.
Agentic tokens versus a shared corporate card
The honest comparison is not Visa versus Mastercard; it is either agentic-token program versus what most teams do today, which is hand an agent a shared corporate card number. On that comparison both networks win decisively. A shared card gives every agent the full credit line, no per-agent attribution, and a card statement at month end that nobody can reconcile to a specific process. A scoped agentic token limits blast radius and keeps the real number out of the agent context. But a token scoped to a merchant is not the same as a budget. It caps what one credential can do at one seller; it does not cap what a fleet of agents can spend across many sellers, nor does it pause anything for a human when an agent tries to renew a contract or buy compute far outside its normal pattern. That is where a control plane comes in.
How AgentsPay governs spend on either rail
AgentsPay is the rail-neutral control plane that sits in front of whichever network moves the money. You do not pick Visa or Mastercard and inherit their governance; you keep one policy layer that works across both. Every agent gets its own funded wallet with hard limits instead of a slice of a shared card. Each intended purchase is checked against policy before a credential exists: per-transaction ceiling, budget over a window, merchant allowlist, velocity rules. Spend above your threshold pauses for a human approval instead of going through. The agent then receives a scoped virtual card or delegated credential valid for that one purchase, riding Visa or Mastercard rails underneath, and every decision lands in an immutable audit trail tied to the agent, its human owner, the intent and the policy that allowed it. Adopt the network program that fits your merchants and settlement needs, and keep one place that never moves money without policy. The same logic applies whether the buyer is a shopping agent or a procurement agent.