Visa and Mastercard are competing to establish infrastructure for agentic AI in B2B payments. The networks aim to control the authentication and authorization rules for AI agents that execute invoice payments.
On November 9, 2025, Clink integrated Mastercard Agent Pay, expanding on its existing support for Visa Intelligent Commerce. This follows an October initiative by Visa involving BILL and Billtrust to automate invoice payments through supplier portals.
According to a September 2025 PYMNTS Intelligence report, nearly 7% of U.S. enterprise CFOs had deployed agentic AI in finance workflows, with another 5% running pilots.
The networks are focusing on making existing financial instructions executable by software. While banks continue to provide credit and liquidity, the networks seek to make their authentication systems the standard for automated transactions.
Liability remains a key challenge for corporate adoption. Determining responsibility for incorrect transactions made by authorized agents is a critical factor for gaining corporate trust in these automated systems.
