Payments & Fintech

Payments & Fintech

Mastercard launches AI tool to flag which suppliers will take a card

Mastercard rolled out Advanced B2B Analytics, which scores corporate suppliers on how likely they are to accept card payments by analyzing accounts payable data and shows the results in dashboards for banks and their clients. Absa Group and Emirates NBD are among the first banks offering the tool to corporate customers.

NoteB2B card payments lag consumer ones because banks rarely know which suppliers will actually say yes to a card, so a scoring tool turns that guesswork into a sales lead list.

Source: Fintech News Singapore·Share

Banking & Lending

Bank of America adds AI benchmarking to its CashPro treasury platform

Bank of America launched Payments Insights, an AI-powered addition to CashPro Data Intelligence that gives corporate and commercial clients peer benchmarking and visualizations on payment efficiency, cross-border flows and working-capital performance. The bank says CashPro handled 213 million payments in the first half of 2026, up 10% from a year earlier.

213Mpayments CashPro handled in H1 2026, up 10% year on year

NoteTreasury teams have had their own payment data for years; what they lacked was a peer benchmark to know if their process is actually slow. Folding that into an existing platform, rather than selling separate analytics, is how a large bank makes an AI feature feel like table stakes.

Source: Bank of America Newsroom·Share

Payments & Fintech

Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI shopping agents

Shopify extended its WebMCP standard with three new tools, get_checkout, update_checkout and complete_checkout, letting an AI agent read a cart, change details like address or delivery, and submit a purchase with the buyer's authorization instead of scraping the page. The rollout covers all eligible Shopify merchants, with Meta's Muse and Instinct AI named as early agent partners.

NoteThis gives agents a structured door into checkout instead of a screen to fake being a shopper on. It moves the agentic commerce question from whether agents can buy to who is liable when one gets the order wrong, the gap last week's bank consortium principles were trying to close.

Source: TechCrunch·Share

★Top story: Banking & Lending

Six global banks set rules for AI agents that shop and pay

ASB Bank, Bank of America, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ING and NatWest published Building Trust in Agentic Commerce, a set of voluntary principles for AI agents that buy on a customer's behalf. They want an audit trail of what the customer asked for, what authority they granted and what happened at payment, and they flag agents that ask for card details and key them into websites.

NoteThe banks are writing the rulebook before a regulator does. If agents must identify themselves and leave a trail, banks keep their seat at the checkout, and the question of who pays for an agent's mistake gets answered before the first big loss.

Sources: PYMNTS, Finextra·Share

Payments & Fintech

Amazon blocks Meta's Muse from shopping on its store

Amazon asked to be removed from Muse's shopping experience and blocked the agent from its site, saying it was never told Muse would access the store and did not authorize it. Muse pays for purchases through Link by Stripe.

NoteThe first real fight in agentic commerce is over who stands between the customer and the checkout. Merchants now want what six banks asked for this week: agents that say who they are.

Source: Payments Dive·Share

Payments & Fintech

Mastercard and Rogers Bank complete what they call Canada's first agentic purchase

A Flybits-built AI assistant followed instructions set by a Rogers Red credit card holder, found an eligible product within a set budget and paid for it using Mastercard Agent Pay. The partners say 41% of Canadians they surveyed are open to letting AI assistants help them shop online.

NoteThis is the other half of the week's agent story. While banks write principles and Amazon blocks Muse, the card networks are building rails that let an agent pay inside limits the customer set.

Sources: Rogers, Finextra·Share