Mastercard and Google: How is Agentic Commerce Advancing?

Mastercard is extending work on its Agent Pay scheme, announced in mid-2025, by using Google’s recently announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open-source standard that acts as a common language for businesses using agentic AI in e-commerce.

With this partnership, Mastercard is aiming to further support the shopping experience for both merchants and consumers by enabling agentic commerce to have more intuitive, secure and flexible features. 

Merchants will be able to experience the benefits of Mastercard’s principles of intent from Google’s UCP. 

Agent Pay and UCP are set to progress the evolution of agentic commerce in a high trust environment for merchants and issuers over time. 

Google has also announced improvements to the agentic shopping experience for merchants using AI and its new Direct Offers initiative, which aims to provide discounts to users ready to buy. 

Mastercard’s AI-powered commerce and its impact on fintech

Mastercard’s Agent Pay, which was first unveiled in April 2025, introduced ‘Mastercard Agentic Tokens’ that build on proven tokenisation capabilities that power global commerce solutions such as mobile contactless payments, secure card-on-file and Mastercard Payment Passkeys. 

With Agent Pay, Mastercard displayed its intent to better serve merchants and consumers by anticipating their needs. 

Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard says: “Open, interoperable protocols are the spark for agentic commerce. 

“As this ecosystem evolves, Mastercard is leaning in with the industry to advance protocols that embed trust, security and responsibility from day one.

“By working with Google and industry partners to extend the foundational principles of Mastercard Agent Pay into these protocols, Mastercard is helping the industry to deliver on the promise of AI-powered commerce for consumers, merchants and issuers.”

Building on existing agentic protocols 

The collaboration will build on Google’s previous introduction of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). Mastercard was one of 60 collaborators announced as part of the project. 

AP2 introduces a chance for open communications between autonomous agents and merchants, allowing for safe transactions across different types of payment methods. 

The current partnership deepens the work already established from the announcement of AP2 and Verifiable Credentials.

Mastercard’s agentic commerce principles consist of intent, tokenisation and agent identification. The payments giant has stated that these are critical for protecting merchants, empowering issuers and driving innovation. 

UCP aligns with these principles, as it serves to establish a common language for agents and systems to easily communicate across consumer surfaces, businesses and payment providers. 

Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping at Google says: “The future of agentic commerce is open and collaborative. 

“We’re proud to work across the industry with partners like Mastercard to ensure the Universal Commerce Protocol makes retail seamless and helpful for the entire ecosystem."

Etsy, Shopify, Wayfair, Target and Walmart were some of Google's other key partners in the development of UCP.

So far, several major players in the payment ecosystem including Adyen, American Express, Stripe and Visa have endorsed the project. 

Where can UCP be found? 

Google says that UCP will begin by powering a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode – through Search and also the Gemini app. 

This allows for shoppers to check out from eligible US retailers as they are researching on Google.  

Security is at the forefront of this move, as shoppers will soon be able to confidently buy with Google Pay and payment methods saved in Google Wallet. 

Shoppers will also be able to make a purchase with PayPal in the coming months. 

Merchants could see potential global expansion as Google will work closely with them for expansion, in addition to discovering related products, powering custom shopping experiences and applying loyalty rewards.

AI discounts: Google’s new initiative 

If agentic commerce didn’t encourage the use of AI enough, Google has also announced the introduction of Direct Offers. 

The new Google Ads pilot enables advertisers to include exclusive offers for shoppers who are ready to buy directly in AI Mode. In practice, this could look like a special 20% discount. 

Retailers can set up relevant offers that they want to feature in their campaign as Google uses AI to determine when the offer is ready to be displayed.

Agentic commerce: not just for the everyday consumer

Businesses will also benefit from Google’s introduction of Business Agent, a feature that allows shoppers to chat with brands from Google Search. 

Available only in the US, brands have the option of a customisable branded agent in Merchant Center.

It will be able to answer consumer questions in a brand’s voice, enabling the connection of brand to consumer at critical shopping moments. 

Brands can also train the agent based on customisable data, access new customer insights and enable direct purchases, including agentic checkout, within Merchant Center.