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Head to head · Agent payment protocols · October 2026 research run

Mastercard Agent Pay vs Visa Intelligent Commerce

Visa Intelligent Commerce scores 47.6 (D) on agent readiness against Mastercard Agent Pay's 42.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do agent payment protocols.

All 30 checkout comparisons

Mastercard Agent PayMastercard · Payment protocol E42.5/100graded, not ranked against tools Visa Intelligent CommerceVisa · Payment protocol D47.6/100graded, not ranked against tools

Which one, for what

Mastercard Agent Pay E

Best for Agent platforms that can partner with Mastercard and need card purchases issuers recognise as agentic, with tokens instead of card numbers.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

No public Agent Pay API reference, SDK or sandbox. The portal's Agent Pay API page is a template pointing at a petstore spec

Visa Intelligent Commerce D

Best for Agent platforms that will sign with Visa to pay with consumers' Visa cards under passkey-approved limits, and for merchants and bot-management vendors that want to recognise Visa-approved agents with TAP.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 54 against 47
  • Payments & pricing, 35 against 25
  • Transparency & trust, 62 against 36

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.5 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

The Intelligent Commerce Agent APIs are a restricted product, and VIC credentials come only through Visa's onboarding

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMastercard Agent PayVisa Intelligent CommerceEdge
Reliability16%204042Visa Intelligent Commerce +2
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24754Visa Intelligent Commerce +7
Agent ergonomics13%16.23840Visa Intelligent Commerce +2
Security & auth14%17.57170Mastercard Agent Pay +1
Payments & pricing10%12.52535Visa Intelligent Commerce +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.82322Mastercard Agent Pay +1
Transparency & trust7%8.83662Visa Intelligent Commerce +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalE 42.5/100D 47.6/100

Facts side by side

FactMastercard Agent PayVisa Intelligent Commerce
KindPayment protocolPayment protocol
VendorMastercardVisa
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceAgent Pay is a closed Mastercard network programme. Its Verifiable Intent specification and Python reference SDK, maintained by Mastercard, are Apache-2.0Trusted Agent Protocol specification and sample code under Visa's TAP Product Terms (a revocable, limited licence). The visa/ai integration kit is MIT. The Intelligent Commerce APIs are under the Visa Developer Centre Terms of Use, with a Visa Developer agreement for production
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-06-102026-06-08
Terms last updated
Privacy policy last updated
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

Mastercard Agent Pay

Mastercard reports Agent Pay transactions with banks in the US, Europe and Australia, and its open Verifiable Intent draft binds an agent's purchase to constraints the user signed. Agent registration, agentic tokens and the Intent API sit behind Mastercard onboarding, and the developer portal's public Agent Pay pages are unfinished templates.

Visa Intelligent Commerce

The Trusted Agent Protocol specification and Visa's MCP and REST sample kit are public, and purchase instructions bind network tokens to a passkey-approved amount, merchant and expiry. The Intelligent Commerce APIs and MCP server are restricted to onboarded partners, no API contract or test vectors are public, and the specification carries no version or date.

Before you call either

Mastercard Agent Pay

  1. Don't plan to call Agent Pay directly. Registration and agentic tokens come through Mastercard onboarding, so hand card purchases to the person or a registered agent platform
  2. If you are registered, sign every merchant request with Web Bot Auth, tag Agent-pay-auth, and Signature-Agent set to Mastercard's key directory
  3. Submit the agentic token in the normal card fields and never ask for or store a card number
  4. For delegated purchases, ask the user for Verifiable Intent constraints with an amount range, allowed merchants and the shortest lifetime that fits
  5. Read the merchant guides on developer.mastercard.com as Markdown. The Agent Pay docs section there has no public content

Visa Intelligent Commerce

  1. Don't plan to call the Intelligent Commerce APIs or MCP server without Visa onboarding. Ask the person for the VIC and VTS credentials Visa issues
  2. Read workflows from https://sandbox.mcp.visa.com/mcp/doc/llms.txt or the documentation MCP server's get-docs tool. It returns documentation and takes no payments
  3. Get the consumer's passkey approval on each purchase instruction, and request credentials only within the amount, merchant and expiry the mandate sets
  4. Send confirm-transaction-events after every purchase. Visa uses these signals with the instruction to manage disputes
  5. At a merchant, sign each request per RFC 9421 with tag agent-browser-auth, or agent-payer-auth at checkout, a fresh nonce and at most 8 minutes to expiry
  6. Keep card numbers, CVV and VTS responses out of agent state and logs. Visa changed its own demo agent in June 2026 to stop holding them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Mastercard Agent Pay or Visa Intelligent Commerce?

Visa Intelligent Commerce scores 47.6 (D) on agent readiness against Mastercard Agent Pay's 42.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Mastercard Agent Pay or Visa Intelligent Commerce

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