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Worldline, ING and Mastercard Complete Europes First Live End-to-End Agentic Payment
On June 2 at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, payment‑processing leader Worldline, Dutch bank ING and card network Mastercard announced a historic milestone: the first live, end‑to‑end agentic transaction executed in a production environment.
The transaction was simple yet groundbreaking. An ING cardholder used a Dutch merchant’s site to buy concert tickets for a wedding‑anniversary gift. Instead of the customer navigating the site, a merchant‑side AI agent performed the entire shopping flow. It scanned inventory for tickets that matched the customer’s budget, presented a curated selection, and waited for the customer’s final manual approval before authorising the payment. Once the customer approved, the payment was routed securely through ING’s issuing system, Worldline’s clearing and acquiring platforms, and the Mastercard network.
A key technical feature of the pilot is the use of tokenised identifiers embedded in the transaction payload. The metadata carries explicit, network‑level markers that identify the transaction as agentic. This allows ING to distinguish an authorised algorithmic purchase from a potential fraud attempt, giving the bank full control over authentication logic while maintaining complete traceability across the settlement chain.
The pilot relies on Mastercard’s Agent Pay protocol, introduced in 2025. Agent Pay standardises the architecture for AI‑driven payments, requiring digital agents to be formally onboarded, merchants to deploy uniform integration plug‑ins, and token issuers to preserve transaction visibility. Brice van de Walle, executive vice‑president of core payments Europe at Mastercard, said the milestone “serves as the bedrock for secure machine‑to‑machine financial interactions” and that the protocol “ensures innovation scales safely—built on trust, aligned across the ecosystem and ready for real‑world deployment.”
Worldline’s executive committee member Madalena Cascais Tomé highlighted that the transaction proves the company’s platform can support acceptance, acquiring, authentication and issuer processing at a pan‑European level. She added that the partnership with ING and Mastercard is “making agentic payments a seamless and secure reality.”
From ING’s perspective, Hans Overeem, head of payments at ING Netherlands, noted that the pilot “sets a permanent foundation for the bank’s long‑term relationship with automated account users” and that the bank is “excited about this concrete move towards shaping a future where seamless, intelligent interactions redefine the way we engage with banking and online shopping.”
The pilot’s success is supported by the scale of the partners involved. Worldline reported €4 billion in revenue in 2025 and serves more than 1.2 million merchants worldwide. ING’s banking network spans over 60 000 employees across 100 countries, providing deep regional distribution.
Looking ahead, the consortium plans to use the data from the pilot to explore more complex use cases. These include handling automated, variable recurring subscription models and allowing consumers to delegate micro‑purchases to personal AI assistants within strict, pre‑allocated sovereign spending caps. The shift from card‑on‑file to code‑on‑file is expected to accelerate as the technology matures.
The event marks a significant milestone for the emerging field of agentic commerce, a term that has largely replaced “autonomous commerce” in industry discourse. By proving that AI agents can complete a purchase end‑to‑end in a live production environment, Worldline, ING and Mastercard have laid the groundwork for a new generation of AI‑enabled shopping experiences across Europe.
In the coming months, the partners will likely expand the pilot to additional merchants and product categories, while regulators and industry groups monitor the security and compliance implications of widespread agentic payments. The technology’s readiness for commercial deployment suggests that other payment processors and banks may soon follow suit, potentially reshaping the retail and banking landscapes.
The transaction was simple yet groundbreaking. An ING cardholder used a Dutch merchant’s site to buy concert tickets for a wedding‑anniversary gift. Instead of the customer navigating the site, a merchant‑side AI agent performed the entire shopping flow. It scanned inventory for tickets that matched the customer’s budget, presented a curated selection, and waited for the customer’s final manual approval before authorising the payment. Once the customer approved, the payment was routed securely through ING’s issuing system, Worldline’s clearing and acquiring platforms, and the Mastercard network.
A key technical feature of the pilot is the use of tokenised identifiers embedded in the transaction payload. The metadata carries explicit, network‑level markers that identify the transaction as agentic. This allows ING to distinguish an authorised algorithmic purchase from a potential fraud attempt, giving the bank full control over authentication logic while maintaining complete traceability across the settlement chain.
The pilot relies on Mastercard’s Agent Pay protocol, introduced in 2025. Agent Pay standardises the architecture for AI‑driven payments, requiring digital agents to be formally onboarded, merchants to deploy uniform integration plug‑ins, and token issuers to preserve transaction visibility. Brice van de Walle, executive vice‑president of core payments Europe at Mastercard, said the milestone “serves as the bedrock for secure machine‑to‑machine financial interactions” and that the protocol “ensures innovation scales safely—built on trust, aligned across the ecosystem and ready for real‑world deployment.”
Worldline’s executive committee member Madalena Cascais Tomé highlighted that the transaction proves the company’s platform can support acceptance, acquiring, authentication and issuer processing at a pan‑European level. She added that the partnership with ING and Mastercard is “making agentic payments a seamless and secure reality.”
From ING’s perspective, Hans Overeem, head of payments at ING Netherlands, noted that the pilot “sets a permanent foundation for the bank’s long‑term relationship with automated account users” and that the bank is “excited about this concrete move towards shaping a future where seamless, intelligent interactions redefine the way we engage with banking and online shopping.”
The pilot’s success is supported by the scale of the partners involved. Worldline reported €4 billion in revenue in 2025 and serves more than 1.2 million merchants worldwide. ING’s banking network spans over 60 000 employees across 100 countries, providing deep regional distribution.
Looking ahead, the consortium plans to use the data from the pilot to explore more complex use cases. These include handling automated, variable recurring subscription models and allowing consumers to delegate micro‑purchases to personal AI assistants within strict, pre‑allocated sovereign spending caps. The shift from card‑on‑file to code‑on‑file is expected to accelerate as the technology matures.
The event marks a significant milestone for the emerging field of agentic commerce, a term that has largely replaced “autonomous commerce” in industry discourse. By proving that AI agents can complete a purchase end‑to‑end in a live production environment, Worldline, ING and Mastercard have laid the groundwork for a new generation of AI‑enabled shopping experiences across Europe.
In the coming months, the partners will likely expand the pilot to additional merchants and product categories, while regulators and industry groups monitor the security and compliance implications of widespread agentic payments. The technology’s readiness for commercial deployment suggests that other payment processors and banks may soon follow suit, potentially reshaping the retail and banking landscapes.
