Worldline and ING have completed what the companies describe as Europe’s first end-to-end agentic payment transaction executed in a live production environment, working in collaboration with Mastercard.
The milestone demonstrates how AI agents can initiate and support purchases within existing banking and payments infrastructure while preserving customer authorization, authentication controls, and issuer oversight.
The transaction was announced at Money20/20 Europe and involved an ING customer making a purchase through a merchant AI agent. Mastercard’s payment network facilitated the transaction, while Worldline provided acquiring, authentication, and issuer processing capabilities across the payment flow.
The demonstration marks an important step in the development of agentic commerce, an emerging model in which AI systems assist consumers with product discovery, purchase decisions, and transaction execution under predefined user controls.
In the pilot use case, an ING customer searched for a wedding anniversary gift online. A merchant AI agent identified suitable options within the customer’s budget, presented recommendations, and initiated the purchase process only after receiving explicit approval from the user.
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Authentication was then completed through ING’s existing banking security framework before the transaction was processed through Worldline’s payments infrastructure.
Unlike fully autonomous spending models, the transaction was designed around customer-controlled authorization. Each payment carried identifiers indicating that an AI agent had participated in the transaction flow, enabling transparency for issuing banks and allowing them to maintain full control over authentication and approval decisions.
The successful transaction represents one of the first real-world demonstrations that agentic payments can operate within regulated financial infrastructure while meeting the security, governance, and compliance requirements expected by banks, payment networks, and merchants.
Industry attention is increasingly shifting toward agentic commerce as financial institutions explore how AI can participate in payment journeys without compromising customer trust or regulatory oversight.
The pilot also highlights the growing role of payment infrastructure providers in enabling AI-powered commerce. Beyond technical execution, future adoption will depend on establishing standardized frameworks for authentication, authorization, liability management, and issuer visibility.
The companies believe the transaction validates the operational foundations necessary to support broader deployment of agentic payments across Europe.
Potential future use cases include recurring AI-managed purchases, delegated spending within predefined limits, automated subscription management, procurement workflows, and personalized commerce experiences.
As AI becomes more deeply embedded in consumer and business purchasing decisions, agentic payments are emerging as one of the most closely watched developments in the global payments industry.
The Worldline, ING, and Mastercard pilot provides one of the clearest indications to date that AI-assisted transactions are beginning to move from experimentation into production-grade financial infrastructure.
