Mastercard Goes Live with Agentic Payment Pilots in ASEAN, Plans Singapore AI Centre

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Mastercard has gone live with authenticated agentic transactions in Singapore and Malaysia and plans to open a regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore later this year.

The rollout marks the first wave of Mastercard’s AI-initiated payments effort in the region, with more ASEAN markets set to follow.

Later this year, Mastercard’s Singapore AI Centre of Excellence will bring together its innovation, cybersecurity and AI capabilities and serve as its largest innovation space in APAC.

The centre will support broader work in payments, fraud detection, cybersecurity and real-time risk management.

Mastercard worked with UOB on the initial region-wide testing and with local banks in each market to support local deployments.

The pilots are meant to support wider expansion on trusted rails as more stakeholders come on board.

“Our multi-market collaboration with Mastercard shows how trusted, AI‑driven payments can enhance everyday banking and commerce, tailored to diverse lifestyle needs across markets.

As adoption grows, we continue to combine innovation and strong governance to scale these capabilities across borders and sectors, unlocking greater value for consumers and businesses across ASEAN,”

said Jacquelyn Tan, Head of Group Personal Financial Services, UOB.

The rollout is built around Mastercard Agent Pay, which supports AI-powered commerce through tokenised credentials, verifiable intent and end-to-end auditability, using Mastercard Agentic Tokens and Payment Passkeys.

The framework is designed to keep AI-initiated transactions aligned with what users have authorised.

Mastercard said verifiable intent, which it co-developed with Google, creates a tamper-resistant record of what a consumer approved when an AI agent acts on their behalf, giving issuers, merchants and consumers a shared reference point for the transaction.

“The first wave of authenticated agentic transactions across ASEAN shows how quickly the region is embracing secure, AI‑enabled commerce.

With early pilots now live across multiple markets, Mastercard is proving that AI agents can operate responsibly and transparently, giving consumers confidence that every transaction is authenticated and anchored in verifiable intent,”

said Safdar Khan, Division President, Southeast Asia, Mastercard.

Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by mkmult via Freepik