Mastercard offers bank cards to AIs so they can spend your money

Agentic payments, the future in which your digital assistant does your shopping for you, are slowly moving beyond professional settings and into the real world. After Visa, Mastercard is about to take the step with Alchemy, a startup specializing in virtual cards designed for AI agents.Official approval is expected any day now.

A card, an email, a number: the AI agent gets its full toolkit

The setup is reminiscent of a prepaid card given to a teenager, spending cap included. The user sets the parameters—a price range, for example—then steps back: the agent then makes its purchases without going through the validation stage. To operate, each agent receives from Alchemy a genuine toolkit for an autonomous identity: a dedicated email address, phone number and stablecoin wallet (a token whose value tracks the dollar). These are supplemented by single-use Mastercard credentials, discarded after each transaction.

On paper, the system keeps risks in check, but in detail, the communication remains surprisingly thin: no figures on spending caps, no rollout schedule by country. There is no explanation, above all, about what to do when the agent chooses the wrong product, quantity or website. Companies do no more than promise a safe, consumer-controlled setup. That is only half reassuring, at best.

And what about your bank’s strong authentication in all this?

In Europe, the issue becomes more complicated with the DSP2 directive: online payments require strong authentication, unless exceptions are provided for in the applicable legislation.Strong authentication. That code sent by your bank, or that detour through the app with fingerprint recognition, which you know inside out (and curse every time you are in a hurry to make a purchase).An agent that pays for its own orders bypasses this ritual by definition. Payment networks will have to convince European regulators that their delegated purchasing arrangements comply with all the requirements of current law, and nothing has been made public on this point.

Yet the playing field is no longer uncharted here, with Revolut and Visa having already carried out France’s first real-world, AI-initiated payment. The building blocks are therefore coming together on both sides: the payment giants provide the rails, while the banks test the train.

For you, there is nothing mandatory in the short term; no one will connect an agent to your account without your explicit consent. The rail now exists at the world’s two largest payment networks, and a rail that has been built rarely waits long before being used. The thousand-euro question remains (literally, depending on your spending cap): the day the agent buys the wrong thing, will your banker show as much understanding as an AI?

👉🏻 Follow the latest tech news in real time: add 01net to your feeds on Google and subscribe to our WhatsApp channel.

Source: Wall Street Journal