Collaboration between Mastercard, ING and Worldline helped perform the first agentic payment settlement in Europe, but what does it take for it to scale across the rest of the region?
In a first for Europe, Mastercard, ING and Worldline collaborated to complete the region’s first end-to-end agentic payment.
Announced during Money 20/20 Europe, the agentic transaction was processed on the Mastercard network and involved an ING customer sending a payment to a Worldline merchant in the Netherlands.
Utilising AI agents, an ING user searched for wedding anniversary gifts online, to which the Dutch merchants’ agents identified concert tickets, presented with budget, associated presents and selections.
The user was able to complete the transaction after granting its approval. The approval authentication process was handled by the issuing bank ING, while Worldline processed the payment across the end-to-end channels.
Built on the purpose to be consumer-driven, the agentic transaction ensured the consumer has total control over the final purchase decision.
The three companies integrated identifiers of the AI agents used to facilitate the payment, enabling transparency to ING which allowed authentication and authorisation control. The payment was processed throughout the full lifecycle and was traceable for Mastercard to ensure it settled securely.
Madalena Cascais Tomé, Member of the Executive Committee of Worldline, said: “Agentic commerce is no longer theoretical, it is production-ready today.
“As the agentic commerce space accelerates – with major international card schemes and financial institutions actively building agentic frameworks and orchestration standards – the critical question has shifted from can it work to can it be trusted at scale. Worldline and ING’s production transaction provides a concrete, verifiable answer.”
Built for future European scale?
Agentic commerce has proliferated across the world, in particular Europe, as consumers are increasingly leveraging generative AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, to assist their consumer journey and decision making.
A McKinsey report revealed in May that 84% consumers from the UK, France and Germany use AI tools for everyday life. The third most popular search to agents was the discovery of brands, products and services and has now been adapted to the point-of-sale.
In October 2025, Checkout.com’s research found 70% of 25-34-year-olds would allow AI agents to handle transactions on their behalf, with 49% revealing they are already granting permission for AI agents to support the agentic payment journey.
Recognising the surge and potential of agentic payments for the e-commerce sector, Mastercard launched Agent Pay in April 2025. The service uses agentic tokens to facilitate agentic payments to secure card-on-file and support subscription and recurrable payments.
Using Agent Pay for the European agentic transaction alongside ING and Worldline, Mastercard integrated traditional payment frameworks to enable the issuing bank visibility of the compliance parameters needed to secure the transaction.
The global card network company believes the onboarding of AI agents to the payment lifecycle can grow in scale by leveraging traditional standards, while utilising next-generation technologies to enhance the speed and flexibility of e-commerce transactions.
Brice van de Walle, EVP of Core Payments Europe at Mastercard, added: “Mastercard establishes the foundation for how this ecosystem can operate at scale: agents are onboarded within defined standards and controls, merchants are enabled through consistent integration frameworks, and issuers retain full visibility and control over every transaction.
“With Agent Pay we ensure that innovation scales safely-built on trust, aligned across the ecosystem and ready for real-world deployment.”
