At MPE 2026, The Paypers’ Mélisande Mual sat down with Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President, Core Payments at Mastercard for a conversation about the forces reshaping merchant payments over the next 24 months. The conversation covered both the infrastructure changes already underway, and the new questions merchants will need to answer as AI agents start participating in the transaction flow. Below are the main takeaways.
Three shifts reshaping merchant payment
Asked which strategic shifts will most fundamentally reshape merchant payments over the next 24 months, Brice van de Walle pointed to three.
- Tokenization: Mastercard’s goal of achieving 100% tokenized online transactions continues to gain traction, with the company reaching 57% so far.
- Authentication: biometrics and passkey shape how consumers authenticate online, with implications for approval rates, fraud rates, and user experience.
- Stablecoins: off the back of Mastercard’s recently announced acquisition of BVNK, the framing in the interview was clear: this is not about replacing cards, but about enabling stablecoin settlement and the flows already happening in that space. The interview gets into where Mastercard sees the most interesting use cases.
Faster money movement: instant clearing
Alongside stablecoin settlement, Mastercard is making a significant change to how money moves on card rails, moving to what it calls instant clearing. Rather than a few clearing cycles per day and limited settlement windows, clearing will happen instantly in parallel with authorisation, settlement frequency will increase, and settlement will run on weekends too. The interview lays out what that means for merchants and the legacy this addresses.
Agentic commerce: trust, standards, and verifiable intent
On agentic commerce, Mastercard’s starting point was trust. With AI agents now becoming a kind of fifth party in the model, the priority is making sure they understand the rules of the game and participate in the ecosystem properly. Mastercard has introduced a set of standards so information moves consistently between agent, merchant, acquirer, and issuer, and a Know Your Agent framework that mirrors how token requesters were certified in the past.
Mastercard also announced what it calls Verifiable Intent, a framework that captures the consumer’s identity, the instructions and limits given to the agent, the consumer’s consent, and the actions the agent took on their behalf. All of it is bundled together and cryptographically protected, with selective disclosure to the relevant parties when something needs to be resolved post-purchase.
Where adoption stands and what it means for merchants
Twelve months ago, the conversation about agents and online purchases was still very early-day. Today, the first tokenized agentic transactions have happened, pilots are running across multiple regions, and 99% of issuers are enabled to support agentic tokens. Mastercard expects the first agentic transactions initiated by European merchants or acquirers to happen this year, with broader adoption likely taking two to three years as merchants adjust internal processes, data handling, and infrastructure.
The interview closed on what Mastercard sees as the strategic imperative for merchants, including how merchants should be preparing for an agentic commerce-led future.
These are the takeaways. Listen to the full interview for the complete conversation with Mastercard to get all the details.