Mastercard Inc

Consumer artificial intelligence agents could reshape online shopping, payments and financial services, but their success will depend on how established companies respond, according to Bernstein. The rapid growth of Muse, which can compare products and quotes, call businesses, send emails, fill forms, manage inboxes, cancel subscriptions and negotiate for users, has fuelled speculation about an "iPhone moment" for consumer AI, with OpenAI launching Dots and Google expected to improve Spark. Amazon blocked Muse within two weeks of launch, citing lack of prior notification, failure to identify itself, apparent collection of customer credentials and access to account pages and order histories, while others including Shopify, Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair, Dick's Sporting Goods, Ulta Beauty, Fanatics, Expedia and Instacart have partnered with Muse for shopping and checkout. Bernstein expects selective access rather than blanket blocking, and Muse is developing API connectors with retailers, although it currently mainly browses websites, fills forms and prepares orders for user confirmation. Cloudflare says AI-agent requests on its network rose over 1,700% in a year, while human traffic in heavily crawled retail and financial-services categories fell as much as 40%, and Bernstein sees payments as a potential winner, with more online transactions potentially benefiting Visa, Mastercard and processors Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.

SoFi Technologies is working with Orbi and Mastercard on new crypto-linked payment cards in Mexico, with the Orbi program using SoFi Tech Solutions infrastructure to support crypto-to-fiat card spending for Mexican consumers. The partnership plugs SoFi Tech Solutions into issuing, authorization, processing and compliance for the cards, with SoFi providing Mastercard BIN sponsorship and connectivity to the Mexico Domestic Switch. Orbi customers can spend from either fiat or crypto balances, with SoFi's stack handling point-of-sale conversion so merchants are always paid in local currency. The launch creates a potential path for stablecoin-powered remittance products built on SoFi's technology in Latin America, and the company said the Orbi and Mastercard program in Mexico only captures part of what SoFi is building out. A key factor to watch will be whether SoFi Tech Solutions secures additional Latin American card programs or remittance products that also adopt SoFiUSD, especially through Mastercard's network, with multiple issuers going live over the next 12 to 24 months indicating that Orbi is a template rather than a one-off experiment.

Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said the clearest use case for stablecoins today is in cross-border payments, telling Bloomberg TV that such transfers take days and carry unclear fees. "If you make a cross-border payment, it takes days; the fees are unclear. From a working capital perspective for a company, if you could move the money instantly, it would be so much better," Miebach reportedly said. Mastercard, alongside Visa, Stripe and other partners, launched the Open USD stablecoin on Solana last month. Miebach said the company was keen to create a stablecoin focused particularly on moving money rather than on investment purposes.

Synchrony Financial reported second-quarter revenues of $3.72 billion, up 1.9% year on year, falling short of analysts' expectations by 0.7% even as it beat EPS and efficiency ratio estimates. The consumer credit card lender, which powers over 73 million active accounts through partnerships with Amazon, PayPal, and Lowe's, delivered the slowest revenue growth among the 6 credit card stocks tracked, and its shares are down 2% since reporting, trading at $71.93. Bread Financial posted the group's biggest analyst estimate beat, with revenues of $993 million, up 6.9% year on year and 3.5% above expectations, though its stock is down 4.2% at $97.63. American Express turned in the weakest performance against estimates, with revenues of $18.55 billion, up 12.8% year on year but 5.8% short of consensus, sending shares down 10.7% to $304.51. Mastercard reported revenues of $9.28 billion, up 14.1% and 2.2% above expectations, with its stock up 1.2% at $570.12, while Capital One delivered the group's fastest revenue growth at $15.83 billion, up 25.8% and in line with estimates, though its shares are down 5% at $195.91. As a group, the 6 credit card stocks reported revenues in line with consensus, but share prices have collectively declined 3.2% since the latest earnings results.

The architecture for institutional stablecoins effectively locked into place between October 6 and October 8, 2026, as five distinct infrastructure layers shipped simultaneously to satisfy the requirements of the GENIUS Act. The reserve layer is now a functional duopoly of the JPMorgan JLTXX fund, holding $733.7 million in assets under management, and the BlackRock BSTBL parent fund, backed by a $6.1 billion parent fund, because the GENIUS Act's 40% concentration limit on any single tokenized reserve asset forces issuers to use both. Above the reserves, SAP Pay has been embedded into SAP Cloud ERP, supporting USDC and EURC across 89 corridors and reaching approximately 400,000 customers. The credit layer gained the first-ever stablecoin protocol rating from Moody's, which assigned a B3 rating to the Sky Protocol alongside an S&P B- rating, defining a 0.9% capital ratio and upgrade and downgrade thresholds. On the merchant side, Citi connected its $6 trillion payment network to Coinbase stablecoin rails, covering 150 million cardholders with a 3.75% platform incentive. These layers feed four settlement rails: SoFi and Mastercard, Visa's $20 billion annualized volume, Stripe's expansion across more than 100 countries, and Solana's delivery-versus-payment capabilities. The urgency stems from the January 18, 2027, effective date of the GENIUS Act, with seven federal agencies having failed to meet their July 2026 rulemaking obligations, while a survey by the American Bankers Association and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors found 18% of community banks plan to launch tokenized deposits within 12 months and 60% expect to lose ground to the new stablecoin rails.

Crossmint has launched Agent Commerce Toolkit, a live, self-serve developer toolkit that lets AI agents pay with any card and complete purchases at any online store through a single integration. The toolkit replaces the four or more vendors agent payments typically require today, combining card storage, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay credentials, and merchant checkout into one API. Card entry renders in the developer's own UI and goes directly to a PCI-compliant vault, so developers' servers receive only a token and never touch card numbers, keeping them out of PCI scope. Where a card supports it, the toolkit uses tokenized credentials from Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, and when a card is not eligible it still completes the purchase securely from the vault. For each purchase, the toolkit chooses a checkout path based on availability, reliability and cost using embedded options like Shop Pay, agentic commerce protocols like Universal Commerce Protocol, or browser automation where neither exists. Developers can integrate it in a single prompt by pointing an AI coding tool such as Claude Code or Cursor at the Crossmint docs, and an open-source reference app on GitHub demonstrates the full flow with live purchases.

Xsolla is enabling eligible Citi Mastercard cardmembers to redeem Citi ThankYou® Points toward video game and in-game digital goods purchases through Xsolla Checkout, the company announced. The capability runs through the existing Xsolla Payments integration and is powered by Mastercard's digital redemption technology, so studios already using Xsolla Payments can offer points as a payment option without building or maintaining a separate loyalty integration. Players visit the Xsolla Shop With Points website, browse participating games, select an eligible purchase, choose points at checkout, enter an eligible Citi card's details, view their ThankYou Points balance and choose how many points to redeem, with any remaining balance charged to the eligible Citi credit card. Xsolla President Chris Hewish said bringing loyalty currencies into checkout widens the path between players and the games they love, while Chief Marketing & Growth Officer Berkley Egenes said the work with Mastercard aims to reward players, build long-term loyalty and reduce friction at checkout. Mastercard Executive Vice President of Services Ranjita Iyer and Citi Head of Citi ThankYou Rewards Chris Besendorfer both framed the launch as an expansion of redemption choice for cardmembers.

The protocol stack for autonomous agent-to-merchant commerce is now effectively complete, but merchant adoption remains fractured and consumer trust lags far behind the infrastructure. Four layers now underpin machine-led spending: the Stripe Machine Payments Protocol, launched in March 2026, provides a programmable policy layer for stablecoin, fiat, and BNPL transactions; the Google Universal Commerce Protocol set an open standard for agentic commerce in January 2026; and by June 2026 Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines with more than 30 launch partners including Adyen, Coinbase, and Stripe. Capital flows have surged alongside these rails, with Visa stablecoin settlement reaching an annualized $20 billion by September 2026, a 15x increase year-over-year, while Stripe stablecoin card volume hit $1.2 billion in the same month. Merchants, however, have split into three incompatible postures: QVC has integrated agents into its supply chain and catalog distribution, sending catalogs to OpenAI and Google; Kate Spade lets agents browse inventory but blocks them at the point of purchase, citing fraud and inventory management risks; and Amazon and eBay have moved to block AI agents entirely, even as Shopify makes Muse the default agent interface for consumers. The core barrier is trust rather than technology, with an NMI survey finding that only 3% of US adults trust AI agents to complete purchases on their behalf, and the VML Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report showing one-third of active AI users refuse to authorize agents to spend their money. The bottleneck has thus shifted from the protocol layer to the trust layer, leaving a high-capacity system operating at a fraction of its potential throughput.

Institutional stablecoin settlement moved onto four live production rails within a single month, with stablecoin-linked card spending reaching $1.2 billion in September 2026, roughly triple the year-earlier figure, according to PaymentScan data cited by CoinDesk. SoFi and Mastercard went live on September 22 with SoFiUSD, the first stablecoin issued by a U.S. nationally chartered bank deployed for live card-settlement production, with $25 billion in annualized card volume migrating to blockchain-based settlement on Mastercard's global payments network. Visa is already operating at a $20 billion annualized run rate for stablecoin settlement as of September 8, a 15x increase from $1.3 billion a year earlier and up from $7 billion in April, while Stripe announced October 1 that it is expanding its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by year-end, up from 18. The Solana DvP standard, launched October 5-6 with JPMorgan advisory input, cuts settlement finality from T+2 days to roughly 400 milliseconds and cost from $50-500 to less than one cent, though it launched with no production settlement volumes yet. Separately, the DTCC's tokenization service, supported by a working group of over 50 firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and State Street, is planned for October launch, and OKX closed a funding extension at a $25 billion pre-money valuation with backing from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures, and Qube Research.

SoFi Technologies reported second-quarter adjusted net revenue of $1.2 billion, up 40%, with GAAP net income climbing 61% to $156.6 million. Total deposits ended the period at $45.5 billion, and average deposits made up over 90% of average liabilities, with the rate paid on deposits running 156 basis points below warehouse facilities, which the company says equals about $712.6 million of annualized interest expense savings. Cross-buy reached 51% of new products, up from 43% the prior quarter and 35% a year earlier, while fee-based revenue of $472.3 million made up 39% of total revenue. The lending segment brought in $724.8 million of net revenue, up 63%, on record originations of $14.8 billion, though the Technology Platform segment saw revenue fall 23% from a year earlier partly because a large client left. SoFi and Mastercard also announced that stablecoin settlement is live across SoFi Bank's card program, moving its entire $25 billion card program onto SoFiUSD, a stablecoin the bank itself issues. Wells Fargo analyst Cassie Chan rates the stock a Hold, citing valuation and earnings exposure to loan sales, and short interest stands at 14.63% of the float.

Mastercard announced a probability score for AI-initiated transactions on September 30, positioning the capability inside its Agentic Commerce Trust Framework alongside Cloudflare for web and payment signal feeds and Skyfire for Know Your Agent verification. The probability score adds a second layer to the trust stack that agent commerce requires, evaluating each AI-initiated transaction dynamically to produce a trust score at the moment of execution rather than asking whether a transaction is legitimate. It builds on Skyfire's Know Your Agent framework, which Mastercard integrated earlier this year and which issues credentials and verifies agent identity at the point of transaction, a foundation also pursued by Baselayer, which raised $35 million to build Know Your Agent infrastructure. With the probability score in place, the trust infrastructure for agent commerce now has four visible layers: Know Your Agent identity verification, transaction-level probability scoring, payment execution with guardrails such as Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite and Visa's Intelligent Commerce, and consumer protection signals that remain nascent and fragmented.

SoFi Technologies and Mastercard announced that stablecoin settlement went live across SoFi Bank, N.A.'s debit and credit card program, migrating its entire US$25.00 billion card portfolio to SoFiUSD. SoFiUSD is the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered bank on Mastercard's global network, positioning bank-issued stablecoins as an operational bridge between traditional payment rails and blockchain infrastructure. The move connects to SoFi's April 2026 launch of Big Business Banking, which lets enterprises manage fiat and crypto, mint and burn SoFiUSD, and access real time payments in a single bank interface. SoFi's narrative projects $7.7 billion revenue and $1.6 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 21.6% yearly revenue growth and an earnings increase of about $1.0 billion from $636.3 million today, while the most pessimistic analysts saw SoFi reaching only about US$6.0 billion revenue and US$1.0 billion earnings by 2029.

Mastercard announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK, targeting digital asset settlement capabilities, and introduced new AI-powered trust and intelligence services designed to monitor and secure agentic commerce transactions. Management positioned the BVNK deal and the agentic commerce safeguards as a response to evolving digital asset rules and AI-driven payment risks. The BVNK acquisition and the new agentic commerce trust tools are only one part of Mastercard's broader payments technology ambitions. The BVNK purchase turns stablecoin plumbing into a concrete extension of Mastercard's value added stack, tying into Agent Pay and SoFiUSD settlement and giving the firm more control over how blockchain based flows interact with its fraud, identity and behavioral tools. The push also increases Mastercard's reliance on complex technology and regulatory regimes where rivals such as Visa and Stripe are active.

The OUSD stablecoin has officially gone live with Visa, Mastercard and Stripe behind it, according to Scott Melker on "The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker." OUSD, or Open USD, is a consortium of fintechs and payment companies launching their own stablecoin to compete in a massive market where high interest rates generate essentially free money, and it is being run by Stripe, which acquired Bridge in a unicorn deal and whose Bridge CEO is also running the blockchain. The stablecoin is launching on multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo, with the bulk of liquidity expected on Stripe's own Tempo blockchain, while reserves will be held at BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank. Five founding members — Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa — will split the equity and have invested a billion dollars for initial liquidity, and depending on usage they will accrue more or less equity or earnings from the stablecoin, meaning earnings accrue to the companies promoting and using it rather than to a private company behind it. The launch follows a huge debate when it was announced, as 140 logos appeared including BlackRock and others, and some companies said they had never heard of it and had not gotten the memo.

BMO and Mastercard announced a new embedded Commercial payments capability that lets eligible Corporate Card clients initiate and manage BMO Commercial virtual card payments directly inside the software platforms they use to run their operations, making BMO the first Mastercard issuer in Canada to offer an integrated embedded finance and payment experience by virtual card within participating platform integrations. The solution, now available for eligible clients in Canada and the United States, integrates Commercial payments into enterprise resource planning, procurement, accounts payable and travel management systems so businesses can manage payments inside their existing workflows. By integrating BMO Commercial virtual cards into participating software platforms through Mastercard's Commercial Express framework, eligible clients can execute secure payments for supplier invoices, travel and corporate expenses without leaving their primary operational workflows, while the framework gives participating platforms a standardized way to enable issuer-backed virtual card payments and reduce implementation complexity. Seth Blacher, Head of TPS Product Management and Payments Modernization at BMO, said the partnership removes the friction between finance software and payment execution, and Diane Miquelon, Senior Vice President, Financial Institutions Partnerships, Mastercard Canada, said embedding virtual card capabilities directly into the platforms where treasury and finance teams operate removes friction, enhances payment security and helps organizations optimize working capital management. BMO Financial Group is the eighth largest bank in North America by assets, with total assets of $1.5 trillion as of July 31, 2026.

Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK for up to $1.8 billion on August 3, 2026, more than double the London-based fiat-to-stablecoin payments firm's $750 million valuation from its December 2024 Series B. The deal follows Stripe's $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in late 2024, and in June 2026 a consortium of more than 140 companies including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock unveiled Open USD, a stablecoin whose news sent Circle's stock down 17% that day. Visa, which had used BVNK as a stablecoin settlement partner before losing it to Mastercard, issued an RFP on August 18 for a replacement licensed in the US, Canada, UK and Singapore, and Visa Ventures invested $10 million in London startup Velocity as a $10 million add-on to its Series A, bringing the total to $48 million, while Visa's stablecoin settlement run rate roughly doubled to about $7 billion annualized by its fiscal second quarter. On September 30, 2026, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority opened its authorisation gateway for cryptoasset firms including stablecoin issuers, with applications running through February 28, 2027 and full enforcement set for October 25, 2027, while in the US seven agencies missed their one-year rulemaking deadline for the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2026, leaving only NPRMs published ahead of a January 18, 2027 effective date. HSBC's HKD stablecoin RedCoin, distributed through its 3.3 million-user PayMe app, along with Citi's partnership with Coinbase and Circle's work with Volante on USDC settlement, point to infrastructure consolidation rather than open experimentation.

Apple's payment service Apple Pay has launched in India, local partner Axis Bank announced on the 30th. India had been one of the few major countries where Apple Pay was unavailable. Axis is the first Indian bank to offer Apple Pay, initially for holders of Visa and Mastercard credit cards. According to the bank's statement, users can register an eligible card in the bank's mobile app or in Apple Wallet and then pay in stores, within apps, and online using an iPhone, Apple Watch, or iPad. Axis is India's third-largest private bank, and according to central bank data its credit card issuance stood at 16.3 million cards as of August, ranking fourth in the country. Reuters reported in September that Apple Pay was also in talks with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, both larger than Axis, but had not yet agreed on terms.

Mastercard's Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of 87 cents per share. The dividend will be paid on November 9, 2026 to holders of record of the company's Class A common stock and Class B common stock as of October 9, 2026. Mastercard Incorporated trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol MA.

Mastercard Incorporated is expanding its commercial-payments capabilities with Mastercard Advanced B2B Analytics, a new AI-powered platform that helps banks and corporate clients identify suppliers more likely to accept card-based payments. The solution uses dynamic acceptance propensity scoring, interactive dashboards and enriched payment data to turn accounts payable data into actionable supplier insights, letting issuers prioritize suppliers, improve outreach and expand card acceptance. Mastercard estimates the addressable B2B payments opportunity at roughly $80 trillion, and Absa Group and Emirates NBD are among the first institutions offering the capability to corporate clients. For Mastercard, the larger opportunity lies in helping issuers convert existing accounts payable relationships into incremental card transactions, which could support higher switched volumes and strengthen its role in the corporate-payments ecosystem. The initiative also aligns with Mastercard's broader expansion into data, AI and value-added services beyond its traditional payment network.

SoFi Technologies has begun migrating its full debit and credit card program to stablecoin settlement using SoFiUSD across Mastercard's network, a live card program expected to handle more than $25 billion in annualized volume. SoFi Bank has already moved transactions onto blockchain rails, and merchants do not need to hold stablecoins or build new infrastructure to participate. Payward will join the SoFi Exchange Network, list SoFiUSD on Kraken and use SoFi's Big Business Banking capabilities, while SoFi will use Kraken Prime for digital-asset liquidity. In the second quarter, management said roughly $300 million of SoFiUSD was in circulation, and second-quarter adjusted net revenues rose 40% year over year to $1.2 billion, with adjusted EBITDA of $358 million at a 30% margin and fee-based revenues of $472 million. Management lifted 2026 adjusted net revenue guidance to $4.75 billion-$4.85 billion while maintaining about $1.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA, and consensus estimates point to 2026 and 2027 EPS increases of 53.85% and 35.91%, respectively. SoFi shares have fallen 36.7% year to date as of Sept. 25, 2026, compared with a 5.7% decline for PayPal and a 17.4% gain for Block, and SOFI trades at a forward 12-month price-to-sales multiple of 3.83X versus 1.32X for PayPal and 1.63X for Block; SOFI carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Mastercard completed Denmark's first live AI-agent payment, putting an AI agent through a real checkout on Priceless.com. A customer asked the agent to book a coffee tasting and approved the purchase; the agent paid with a Danske Bank Mastercard, PayOS handled the transaction, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys confirmed the customer's consent. Mastercard shares were down about 0.1% at $567.12 at 12.02pm ET on September 28. The announcement offered no numbers showing what this new way to pay could earn, and Mastercard disclosed neither fees nor expected payment volume. The stock sits 17.31% below its $685.80 GF Value estimate, leaving adoption, fraud costs and actual transaction growth to determine how much the technology matters to Mastercard's earnings.

Mastercard is piloting One Credential, a solution that links multiple eligible payment relationships to a single tokenized credential, in partnership with City Union Bank in India. The solution targets eligible SME customers managing both business and personal spending, aiming to simplify payment management and give them greater control over how transactions are funded. Mastercard's latest Dreamonomics report found that 63% of Indian SMEs are interested in real-time payments, compared with 51% across Asia-Pacific, while 45% are open to flexible digital payment solutions and 39% are interested in a combined credit/debit business card with controls. Deeper SME engagement could drive demand for commercial cards, cybersecurity, data services and other value-added offerings along with higher transaction volumes, and One Credential could help issuing banks cross-sell additional products without issuing separate cards. Mastercard's shares have risen 14.9% over the past six months compared with the industry's growth of 3.2%, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 25.63 versus the industry average of 17.38.

Mastercard has switched on stablecoin settlement for SoFi Bank's debit and credit cards, using SoFiUSD across a reported $25b card program and tying blockchain-based assets directly into its existing global network. The launch adds to recent card partnerships and open finance integrations that feed into how the market weighs Mastercard's future growth potential against execution and regulatory risk. Mastercard's stock has a 90 day share price return of 13.75%, while the 30 day move is down 5.15%, and its total shareholder return stands at 45.96% over three years and 62.33% over five years. Against a last close of $567.65, the most followed narrative on Mastercard argues for a fair value of $750, a 24% undervalued view. On the other side of that narrative, Mastercard trades on 30.6x earnings, while the fair ratio sits at 21.5x, the US Diversified Financial industry at 17.3x, and direct peers around 48x.

Mastercard is expanding into agentic commerce through Agent Connect even as major banks demand tougher safeguards for AI shopping agents, with fraud, scams and data-privacy risks moving into focus. The payments network's merchant tools can combine Anthropic's commerce-agent blueprint with Mastercard's payment intelligence and authorization controls, aiming to let AI shop for consumers while keeping Mastercard at the center of every transaction. Shares rose roughly 0.9% to $564.98 at 10.47am ET on Thursday morning. The opportunity carries sharp edges: shopping bots could drive more payment volume, but misunderstood instructions, disputed purchases and murky liability could also inflate network costs. At $564.98, Mastercard trades 17.49% below its GF Value of $684.73.

Meta assembled the first integrated agent-commerce stack, letting its Muse agent move from product discovery to completed payment without a human touching checkout. On September 8, 2026, Meta launched Muse with Stripe's Link wallet for agents built in, enabling checkout at more than a million businesses that accept Link, with Link generating a single-use virtual card for other merchants; Muse is the first AI agent covered by Link's purchase protections. Shop Pay arrived on September 21, when Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Meta's Alexandr Wang announced a deep partnership enabling Shop Pay checkout across all Shopify stores and adding Meta as an AI channel inside Shopify's Agentic Storefronts. A day later, PayPal confirmed global payments across its worldwide merchant network, with Mastercard's Agent Pay platform providing the secure payment rails, and PayPal's stock rose nearly 5 percent on the news. By Mark Zuckerberg's September 23 Meta Connect keynote, the pipeline was live with Stripe, Shop Pay, PayPal, Expedia for travel and Instacart for groceries; Keybanc analysts raised Meta's price target to $900, calling it Muse's moment, and Muse hit number one in Apple's US App Store. Each Muse user gets a dedicated Muse Secure VM, an isolated Linux virtual machine with its own browser, where a separate Sentinel agent approves internet access and sensitive actions, credentials stay in vaults the agent cannot read, and every action generates an audit trail, with a Muse Confidential VM planned later in 2026. Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its site, while Muse remains US-only at launch with no global expansion timeline specified and full Shop Pay rollout details undisclosed.

Mastercard is partnering with Alchemy to let developers integrate Mastercard-backed virtual cards directly into AI agents, positioning its network for the growth of agentic commerce. Alchemy's AgentCard will bring Mastercard payment credentials to AI agents through an integration with Mastercard Agent Pay, allowing developers to issue virtual cards with built-in spending limits and restrictions on what and where agents can purchase. The move is part of a broader industry push to build payment infrastructure for AI agents, alongside Visa's Intelligent Commerce and similar toolkits from PayPal, Stripe, and Coinbase. Adoption remains limited: a January Omnisend survey found only 8.29% of U.S. shoppers were fully comfortable with AI completing online purchases for them, while Visa's risk unit reported in 2025 that dark web references to AI Agent rose more than 450% over six months versus the prior six months. Citrini Research's February scenario, framed as a thought experiment rather than a forecast, warns that cost-optimizing AI agents could eventually bypass card rails, where interchange fees are commonly cited at 2% to 3%, and shift transactions to stablecoin rails costing a fraction of a cent each, cutting the network fees Mastercard earns on volume. Hedge fund interest was largely unchanged, with funds holding the stock rising slightly from 157 at the end of Q1 2026 to 158 at the end of Q2 2026, and short interest stood at just 0.87% of float as of August 31, 2026.

SoFi has begun settling debit and credit card transactions across Mastercard's network using SoFi USD, its own stablecoin, in what the companies describe as live blockchain settlement rather than a pilot. SoFi is migrating its entire credit card program, which is expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume, onto the arrangement. Under the setup, consumers use a normal credit card without needing to hold crypto or know that blockchain is involved, while merchants are paid as usual, receiving funds in their SoFi bank account and converting them to dollars with round-the-clock access. The settlement itself runs entirely on blockchain stablecoin rails in the background, with the blockchain component invisible to both cardholders and merchants. The development was discussed by Scott Melker on "The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker," which airs daily at 12:00 p.m.

Bitcoin ETFs took in $1.7 billion in inflows over a strong two-day run, with $714.7 million arriving on Tuesday after Monday's roughly $1 billion haul, the ninth biggest inflow day ever, bringing the four-day streak to about $2.3 billion. In the stablecoin world, Mastercard and SoFi have teamed up on stablecoin settlement for cards, with SoFi now settling debit and credit card transactions across Mastercard's network using SoFi USD and migrating its entire credit card program, which is expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume. Binance has invested $100 million into Circle, buying shares at a 5% discount on a vesting schedule, and signed a new five-year commercial agreement to promote USDC on its platform. Binance is also under US scrutiny over possible Iran sanctions violations, according to Bloomberg News. BitMEX, the exchange that invented the perpetual swap, has now closed.

Moov Financial, Inc. announced Moov Money, a real-time person-to-person payment solution built in collaboration with Visa and Mastercard that lets consumers send and receive money using only an eligible debit card and a trusted mobile phone connection. Unlike other P2P services that require both parties to use the same app, Moov Money uses the debit card as the payment destination, reaching the 90.5% of U.S. consumers who carry a debit card according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's 2025 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. The platform runs on Mastercard Move and Visa Direct, with Moov supplying identity verification, fraud controls and dispute management, and it is available today to banks, credit unions, neobanks and brokerages for domestic person-to-person payments. Jack Henry's Banno Digital Platform is the first to integrate Moov Money, giving more than 1,000 banks and credit unions turnkey access, with others soon to follow. Moov CEO Wade Arnold said moving money shouldn't depend on whether two people use the same app, while Visa Direct North America head Justin Zhao and Mastercard North America EVP Mike Kresse both framed the launch as a step toward interoperable, secure money movement.

Upfront, a financial operations platform serving SMEs across MENA, has partnered with Mastercard to expand digital payment options for smaller businesses. Under the plan, Upfront will add Mastercard commercial card capabilities to its platform, sitting alongside its existing accounts receivable, accounts payable and cash flow management services, and letting eligible SME customers access approved financing through a commercial card for business payments including supplier bills and operating expenses. Upfront will continue to manage the financing relationship with its SME customers, while the Mastercard commercial card programme acts as an additional digital payment channel for approved funds. The initial rollout is expected to centre on Upfront's SME customers in the UAE, with any broader expansion depending on the final programme structure, regulatory requirements and market readiness. Mastercard said its wider SME support includes Built Small, Moving Strong, a platform developed in response to pressures faced by small businesses during recent disruption. Upfront CEO and founder Anas Qudah called the partnership an important step towards making business finance more responsive, and Mastercard EVP for EEMEA commercial and new payment flows Onur Kursun said the collaboration combines fintech innovation with secure commercial payment capabilities.

Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.