- Key insights: Mastercard's earnings beat analyst expectations, while CEO Michael Miebach discussed opportunities in agentic AI.
- What's at stake: Most large payment companies are investing in agentic AI, creating an arms race.
- Forward look: Mastercard's agentic technology product, Agent Pay, will be available in the U.S. in November, and globally early in 2026.
Mastercard posted strong earnings for the third quarter, noting healthy consumer and business spending, while promoting its artificial intelligence strategy. Its leaders also said the company is relying on nonpayment products such as consulting and technology to diversify
"If we do this work better than anyone else it's an opportunity for us," Michael Miebach said during Thursday's earnings call. For the quarter ending Sept. 30, Mastercard reported earnings per share of $4.38, up from $3.89 the prior year; and revenue of $8.6 billion, up from $7.37 billion the prior year. That beat Zacks Investment Research EPS estimates of $4.31 and revenue of $8.5 billion. Mastercard's profit was $4 billion, up from $3.6 billion the prior year.
Miebach drew attention to Mastercard's services strategy, saying revenue from "value-added services" grew 25%, adding it recently launched an advertising services product called Mastercard Commerce Media, along with new cyber threat intelligence products and expanded agentic commerce capabilities.
"Third quarter results were ahead of our expectations, due primarily to an increase in cross-border fee and value-added services revenue," wrote Allen Bond, managing director and portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management, in a research note. "This indicates healthy international spending and continued traction with tangential products such as security/digital authentication, consumer acquisition/engagement services, and business/market insights."
Help wanted
Mastercard is aggressively pursuing new forms of artificial intelligence, making several moves during the third quarter. Mastercard's
Agentic AI will be difficult to adopt for local smaller payment networks, so agentic commerce will provide a competitive opportunity given Mastercard's scale, according to Miebach.
For example, agentic commerce poses risk management challenges as companies vet whether an AI agent is legitimate and safe, according to Miebach. "It's a new flow for the transaction, and how will merchants deal with that?" he said, adding Mastercard will register bots, among other services, as part of its agentic AI risk service.
To build scale,
Mastercard's Agent Pay generates personalized payment experiences to consumers, merchants and issuers and is scheduled to release for the holiday shopping season. Mastercard Agent Pay will launch in November in the U.S., with global deployment "shortly" after. The card network has also released Agent Toolkit, which enables AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard's application programming interface documentation using the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, server, which connects AI applications to other technology systems.
Another Mastercard product, Agent Sign-Up, enables Agent Toolkit users to identify agents and access AI-enabled Mastercard products. Other products include Insight Tokens, which enable security for agentic commerce, and agentic consulting services. Even as Mastercard builds AI technology, its payments business is still strong, according to Bond.
"Long-term investors can take comfort in the resiliency of this business. Despite noise surrounding stablecoin legislation, agentic AI platforms, and consumer spending bifurcation, Mastercard's results indicate that electronic transactions continue to outgrow the economy and Mastercard is uniquely positioned to benefit from this trend due to the ubiquity of their acceptance network and proven transaction processing platform," Bond said in a research note.
A good bet?
Among other large payment companies,
In a research note, analysts at Jeffries said Mastercard stands to benefit from its investments in new payment technology.
"The card networks are expected to be the payment mechanism in argentic commerce, establishing trust by setting rules around liability/disputes and what constitutes a valid agent-initiated transaction, registering agents, and tokenizing transactions," Jefferies analysts said.
Agentic commerce can provide a lift for payments since AI agents are more likely to buy a basket of goods from a higher number of merchants, bringing incremental transaction volume, according to Jefferies' analysts. There's also the potential to attach more services, including loyalty or reward points for issuers to ensure cards are top of wallet for an AI agent.
Another current trend in payments, stablecoins, are also a potential benefit rather than a threat to Mastercard, according to Jefferies' analysts, adding the payment networks can be used for on/off ramps, such as using the networks to fund crypto wallets – then spending the balances. Mastercard in recent months has entered several partnerships to
Mastercard is also in talks to acquire crypto firm Zerohash for $2 billion, according to
"Stablecoins are an attractive opportunity," Miebach said during Mastercard's earnings call, noting Mastercard has partnerships with more than 130 cryptocurrency companies.
