# Mastercard Agent Pay vs Visa Intelligent Commerce (slim)

> Visa Intelligent Commerce scores 47.6 (D) to Mastercard Agent Pay's 42.5 (E) for agent payment protocols. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/mastercard-agent-pay-vs-visa-intelligent-commerce.md (~2,450 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/mastercard-agent-pay-vs-visa-intelligent-commerce.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/mastercard-agent-pay-vs-visa-intelligent-commerce
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-16
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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.

- Mastercard Agent Pay: E 42.5, rank graded, not ranked against tools · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/mastercard-agent-pay.min.md
- Visa Intelligent Commerce: D 47.6, rank graded, not ranked against tools · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/visa-intelligent-commerce.min.md
- Mastercard Agent Pay, good for Agent platforms that can partner with Mastercard and need card purchases issuers recognise as agentic, with tokens instead of card numbers.
- Visa Intelligent Commerce, good 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 Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.5 against 2.0 out of 5.

| Category | Mastercard Agent Pay | Visa Intelligent Commerce |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 40 | 42 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 47 | 54 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 38 | 40 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 71 | 70 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 35 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 23 | 22 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 36 | 62 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Mastercard Agent Pay | Visa Intelligent Commerce |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Mastercard | Visa |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| Licence | Agent Pay is a closed Mastercard network programme. Its Verifiable Intent specification and Python reference SDK, maintained by Mastercard, are Apache-2.0 | Trusted 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 |
| Last release | 2026-06-10 | 2026-06-08 |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (4) | 2.5/5 (4) |