Building the Industry's First Agentic Payments Infrastructure
Leading Mastercard's Agentic Pay initiative — an industry-first platform where AI agents autonomously execute payment workflows using GenAI and RAG.
The Challenge
The payments industry is ripe for AI disruption, but no major player had successfully built agentic AI infrastructure — systems where AI agents can autonomously reason about, initiate, and complete payment workflows on behalf of users and businesses.
Mastercard needed a senior strategic and technical leader who could bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and the regulated, high-stakes world of global payments — someone who understood both the technology and the ecosystem.
The Approach
Agentic Architecture
Designed the core agentic AI architecture enabling autonomous payment agents. These agents can understand user intent, reason about payment options, verify compliance, and execute transactions — all without human intervention for routine flows.
GenAI & RAG Pipeline
Built retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that ground AI agent decisions in real-time payment data, regulatory requirements, and merchant information — eliminating hallucination risks in financial contexts.
Cross-Ecosystem Leadership
Served as the senior strategic and technical lead across engineering, product, and partner ecosystems. Aligned diverse stakeholders — from compliance teams to external payment partners — around a unified agentic payments vision.
Production-Grade LLMs
Implemented enterprise-grade LLM infrastructure with appropriate guardrails for financial services — including input/output validation, audit logging, and regulatory compliance checks baked into the inference pipeline.
Tech Stack
The Impact
Mastercard's Agentic Pay represents a paradigm shift in how payments work — moving from user-initiated transactions to AI-agent-initiated transactions. The platform enables a future where AI agents can shop, compare, negotiate, and pay on behalf of consumers and businesses.
This work positions Mastercard at the forefront of the agentic AI revolution in financial services, creating a new category of payment infrastructure that didn't exist before.
Exploring agentic AI for your business?
I help organizations design and implement agentic architectures that are production-ready, compliant, and built for scale.
Book a Strategy Call