Santander and Mastercard complete Europe’s first AI agent payment on live banking rails, marking a turning point for regulated agentic commerce
Banco Santander and Mastercard have completed what they describe as Europe’s first live, end-to-end payment executed by an artificial intelligence agent. Crucially, they have done so not in a test environment, but on Santander’s live payments infrastructure.
The transaction, carried out using Mastercard Agent Pay and orchestrated by PayOS, is significant for going a step beyond the controlled sandbox environments which have defined most agentic payment experimentation to date.
The AI agent initiated and completed the payment within predefined limits and permissions, all while maintaining the security, governance and consumer protection standards required under a regulated banking framework.
Mastercard formally launched its Agentic Payments Programme in April 2025, introducing Mastercard Agentic Tokens – credentials built on the same tokenisation infrastructure already powering contactless payments, card-on-file and payment passkeys.
The programme was designed from the outset to embed AI agents as visible, governed participants in the payment flow rather than opaque intermediaries – a distinction that matters considerably for compliance teams operating under European regulatory scrutiny.
The Santander pilot is the first instance of that infrastructure being validated on live European payment rails.
Matías Sánchez, Global Head of Cards and Digital Solutions at Santander, said: “At Santander, we see AI as a transformative force in the evolution of payments.
“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.”
An industry in motion
Of course, Mastercard has competition in the field, most notably age-old rival Visa, which unveiled its own Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025 – developed in collaboration with Cloudflare.
This established a framework for secure communication between AI agents and merchants at every stage of a transaction, enabling agents to pass payment credentials while helping merchants distinguish legitimate agents from malicious bots.
Visa has since gone further: by December 2025, hundreds of secure agent-initiated transactions had been completed with ecosystem partners, with Visa predicting millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season.
Mastercard, meanwhile, has been scaling its own ecosystem rapidly. The network confirmed it is working with Stripe, Google and Ant International‘s Antom to make secure agentic transactions accessible for digital merchants globally, with all US cardholders set to be enabled for Agent Pay ahead of the 2025 holiday season.
Mastercard Agent Pay has also been integrated into PayPal’s wallet, giving hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants access to agentic commerce experiences.
What comes next for European businesses
The Santander pilot does not constitute a commercial rollout yet, however. The bank has confirmed it will move into extended testing and scaling, exploring further use cases and partnerships while maintaining regulatory alignment before considering a wider deployment of the service.
The governance question is where the most critical work remains. Mastercard is contributing to the FIDO Payments Working Group to define how verifiable credentials can be used to securely authenticate agent and consumer interactions credentials designed to be portable, privacy-preserving and aligned with global standards.
Kelly Devine, President, Europe at Mastercard, said: “Agentic payments represent a profound shift in how commerce is initiated and executed. With Mastercard Agent Pay, we are applying the same principles that have defined our network for decades – security, trust, interoperability and global scale – to a new era of AI-enabled commerce.
“This milestone with Banco Santander demonstrates that innovation and trust can advance together.”
Visa, for its part, frames the shift in generational terms, arguing that agentic commerce will rival the impact that online shopping and mobile devices had on commerce in previous decades.
