Mastercard’s Michael Miebach bets on collaboration for agentic pay

By Nathan Brooks

Mastercard’s revenue grew from $18.9 billion in 2021 to $32.8 billion in 2025, and Modern CEO reported that analysts expect more than $37 billion in 2026. Under Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach, the company expanded beyond consumer credit cards into data, insights, digital identities and stablecoins.

In June 2021, Modern CEO’s CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta interviewed Miebach at Mastercard’s headquarters. Both wore masks and kept their distance as offices reopened after the pandemic and masking and social distancing remained commonplace. Miebach was preparing to become chief executive in January and has since led the company through the pandemic’s end.

Before he became president, Miebach served as chief product officer and concentrated on internal product work. His remit widened with the CEO job, but his operating philosophy changed as much. Miebach told Mehta: “It comes down to changing [my] mindset from ‘I want to compete and differentiate only’ to ‘I want to compete and collaborate.’”

The agent enters the checkout

Agentic commerce uses artificial intelligence agents to find the optimal product on a human’s behalf. Miebach said agents perform well at research and can negotiate deals, but completing transactions remains more elusive. Mastercard treats them as an additional partner in a payments ecosystem with four established participants:

• The cardholder
• The bank that issues the card
• The merchant
• The acquiring bank, which lets the merchant accept payments

Mastercard and Visa link those parties as card networks. An AI agent now enters that chain as another participant rather than replacing the cardholder or a financial institution.

Mastercard launched Mastercard Agent Pay in the U.S. in early 2025 to integrate AI agents into checkout. In June 2025, it launched Agent Pay for Machines, or AP4M, to let agents transact with other agents continuously and at very high speeds. The announcement highlighted 31 participants, many of them fintech companies.

Miebach said the agentic-commerce market already contains other coalitions, cooperatives and competing payment-authorization protocols. He expects the payments ecosystem eventually to converge around shared standards, much as companies did around Apple Pay, introduced in 2014. The precedent also sets a tempo: Apple Pay took more than half a decade to become nearly ubiquitous.

The scale challenge

Mastercard reports that contactless now accounts for 80% of its in-person transactions globally. Agentic purchases remain a tiny part of the 180 billion transactions the company processes annually. Miebach believes that can accelerate once players align on regulations, technology standards, loyalty-point integrations and systems that create consumer trust.

Those trust systems include “know your agent” software that verifies an AI agent is acting for a customer. They also include fraud monitoring and a way for consumers to challenge unauthorized purchases. Miebach identified each control as a condition for scaling agent-led transactions rather than merely letting agents recommend or negotiate products.

Agentic commerce was no longer theoretical for Miebach. During his meeting with Mehta, he said he had used an agent that day to buy printer paper. The purchase was neither exciting nor expensive, but his verdict captured the state of the market: “It worked.”

What does collaboration change for merchants and banks?

For merchants, banks and payment networks, the immediate task is integration: recognizing agents at checkout and supporting continuous, machine-to-machine transactions. Agent Pay does the first; AP4M targets the second. The 31-participant AP4M launch puts Mastercard’s collaboration thesis in front of fintechs and other partners, although competing authorization protocols leave interoperability unsettled.

Mastercard’s bet is that collaboration can turn those partnerships into common rails. Standards still matter as much as scale: without aligned authorization, identity verification and dispute rules, the agent may remain a research and negotiation tool rather than the party that completes the sale.

Collaboration also changed Miebach himself. He said COVID taught him to lead without a playbook, and executives increasingly operate without all the answers. Employees and leaders now learn as they go, particularly in fast-moving technologies such as agentic commerce. He said he can operate much better without having an answer.

Separately, Modern CEO is seeking nominations for its 2026 Modern CEO of the Year. Submissions close December 4, and the winners will be announced December 28.

The next test is whether the 31 AP4M participants can produce aligned authorization, identity and trust standards. If they do, agentic purchases can accelerate from a tiny share of Mastercard’s 180-billion-transaction base. If they don’t, agents may remain useful for research and negotiation while conventional checkout systems complete the sale.