Lobster.cash Teams With Mastercard to Secure Agentic Card Transactions

Lobster.cash, a payments solution for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, has joined forces with Mastercard.

The partnership, announced Thursday (April 16), will see Lobster.cash integrate Mastercard Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent to enable secure card transactions for AI agents. This integration lets Mastercard cardholders authorize autonomous agents to make purchases on their behalf using their existing cards.

“Mastercard Agent Pay is one of the most trusted payment infrastructures designed for agentic commerce in the world. Bringing it to lobster.cash means agent users don’t need a new wallet or a new card,” Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas, co-founder of Lobster.cash creator Crossmint, said in a news release.

“They can put the card they already have to work for their agent, with the security and control they expect from Mastercard. This is how agentic payments reach everyone.”

According to the release, the service will initially launch on the OpenClaw platform, which currently has over one million agents deployed across 20 messaging platforms, with plans to expand to other agentic ecosystems like Claude Code, Devin and Hermes.

The technical framework relies on Basis Theory as the credential layer for the agents. Transactions are processed through Mastercard’s network and governed by issuer-aligned controls, ensuring that oversight remains with financial institutions, the release added.

To ensure accountability, all transactions will use the Verifiable Intent framework. Created by Mastercard and Google, Verifiable Intent is a protocol-agnostic trust layer aligned with the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

Writing about Verifiable Intent when it debuted last month, PYMNTS noted that the goal is to “link a consumer’s identity, their specific instructions and the outcome of a transaction into a single, tamper-resistant record,” creating a “cryptographic audit trail” that all parties can turn to if a dispute occurs.

“As autonomy increases, trust cannot be implied,” said Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard. “It must be proven. And if something goes wrong, everyone needs facts, not guesswork.”

In other Mastercard news, PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with Mark Barnett, global head of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), about the challenge of getting those businesses to embrace the cards designed for them.

“Just putting an SME card in the hands of an SME isn’t going to mean they’re going to use it,” Barnett said.

He pointed to Mastercard/PYMNTS Intelligence research showing that 45% of SMEs want to scale back their reliance on cash — a sign that intent is already there, even if adoption is uneven.

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