Payments are quietly preparing for a future where software — not humans — initiates transactions. Fiserv is positioning itself for that shift by aligning with the largest U.S. card networks to support what the industry calls agentic commerce, a model in which artificial intelligence tools act on behalf of shoppers.
The payments processor has confirmed new working relationships with Visa and Mastercard, giving merchants access to emerging frameworks designed for AI-driven purchasing. The goal is to help businesses operate safely in environments where autonomous agents search, evaluate, and eventually execute transactions.
Under the arrangement with Visa, Fiserv plans to expose its merchant clients to tools built around agentic commerce protocols. These systems are intended to help AI shopping agents locate products while also providing safeguards that separate legitimate software agents from harmful or fraudulent bots.
A parallel agreement with Mastercard takes a slightly different approach. Through Mastercard’s agent payments framework, AI agents must be registered and verified before they are allowed to transact on the network. The idea is to introduce identity and accountability into a space that could otherwise be flooded with anonymous automation.
According to Fiserv, these partnerships are meant to lower the barrier for merchants that want to experiment with AI-driven buying without sacrificing trust or control. Company leadership has framed the effort as a way to let businesses of any size participate in the next phase of digital commerce using established payment standards rather than experimental infrastructure.
Exactly when merchants will be able to activate these capabilities remains unclear. Fiserv has not provided a rollout timeline, and further details were not immediately available.
The move comes as AI companies race to redefine how people shop online. Tools developed by firms such as OpenAI and Perplexity already assist users by scanning catalogs, comparing prices, and narrowing choices. These systems, often described as AI agents, currently stop short of making purchases themselves — but that boundary is expected to erode.
Card networks have been laying the groundwork for that transition. Earlier this year, Visa and Mastercard both signaled that they were preparing their payment rails for a world where autonomous software, rather than a human clicking “buy,” initiates transactions. Visa has already opened access to its infrastructure for developers building agentic systems and introduced protocols meant to reassure merchants that an AI agent is genuine.
Fiserv’s decision to plug into those efforts suggests the payments ecosystem is no longer treating agentic commerce as speculative. Instead, it is being engineered as a controlled extension of existing networks — one that assumes machines will soon be trusted to spend money, provided they can be verified, governed, and held to shared standards.