Mastercard and Santander Complete EU’s First Agentic Payment

Mastercard and Santander completed Europe’s first live end-to-end payment using an artificial intelligence agent, according to a Monday (March 2) news release.

The transaction marks the first agentic payment conducted within a regulated banking framework. It also represents “a significant milestone in the application of AI systems capable of initiating and completing transactions on behalf of customers,” the release said.

Santander carried out the transaction in a “controlled environment” using Agent Pay, the agentic AI-driven payments program introduced by Mastercard last year, per the release.

“The transaction was processed through Santander’s live payments infrastructure to validate the end-to-end operational and control framework under real conditions,” the release said. “The solution enables AI agents to initiate and execute payments on behalf of customers within predefined limits and permissions.”

This lets AI systems securely and transparently complete a purchase via existing payment networks, while upholding strict security, privacy and consumer protection standards, according to the release.

“At Santander, we see AI as a transformative force in the evolution of payments,” Matías Sánchez, global head of cards and digital solutions at Santander, said in the release. “Our role is not only to adopt innovation, but to shape it responsibly, embedding security, governance and customer protection by design. As AI agents become part of everyday commerce, building trusted, scalable frameworks will be essential to unlocking their full potential.”

Meanwhile, Kaushik Gopal, executive vice president of business and market insights at Mastercard, told PYMNTS last month that leaders should treat agentic AI as a shift in how work gets done.

“Ultimately, when we get to this agentic world where a lot of activity is delegated, it is ensuring that there is a highly secure framework that is protecting that activity,” Gopal said. “That’s what creates a high level of trust and confidence from ecosystem participants to engage in that space.”

Mastercard is positioning its Agent Suite as an answer to a practical problem. Many companies want to move fast, but they lack the foundation to safely deploy AI agents at scale.

One-third of enterprise software applications are expected to involve agentic AI by 2028, Mastercard said, adding that the company “expects a significant percentage of customer interactions and operational tasks to be supported by AI agents by 2030.”

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