Mastercard to roll out authenticated agentic transactions in ASEAN

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Consumer Ecosystems; 07 April 2026; 7344 views

Payment giant Mastercard has announced what it describes as a major step forward in its ASEAN AI strategy with the successful rollout of authenticated agentic transactions across multiple ASEAN markets, alongside plans to establish a new regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.

Agentic transactions are AI-driven, automated purchases where digital agents – acting as proxies for consumers – browse, compare, and execute payments based on user-defined goals and authority.

The first wave of authenticated agentic transactions will take place across Singapore and Malaysia, with additional markets to follow. This, says Mastercard, demonstrates the region’s readiness for interoperable AI agents enabling secure, transparent transactions.

Mastercard collaborated with United Overseas Bank (UOB), a leading Singaporean multinational bank, for the initial region-wide testing. The collaboration leveraged the Bank’s extensive network within ASEAN, ensuring that future agentic transaction deployments could scale across diverse markets.

Mastercard also worked with local banks in each country to support localised deployments. Together, it says, these pilots create a foundation for broader regional expansion on trusted rails as additional stakeholders come on board.

Safdar Khan, Division President, Southeast Asia, Mastercard says: “With early pilots now live across multiple markets, Mastercard is proving that AI agents can operate responsibly and transparently, giving consumers confidence that every transaction is authenticated and anchored in verifiable intent.”

The partners say Mastercard Agent Pay enables the next phase of AI-powered commerce by providing the safeguards and framework needed for secure and trusted AI-initiated purchases. By combining tokenised credentials, verifiable intent and end-to-end auditability (through Mastercard Agentic Tokens and Payment Passkeys), the framework ensures every AI-initiated transaction is aligned with consumer authorization and expectations for trust.

Consumer protection is also keeping pace thanks to the introduction of Verifiable Intent, a new, standards-based trust paradigm for agentic commerce, co-developed with Google. Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user has authorised when an AI agent acts on their behalf and acts as a shared source of truth across the ecosystem that consumers, merchants and issuers can rely on.

Later this year, Mastercard will launch its regional AI Center of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore, combining its innovation hub, advanced cybersecurity capabilities and AI expertise to create Mastercard’s largest innovation space in Asia-Pacific.