Worldline ING and Mastercard complete Europe s first Agentic Payment pilot

By Matthew Griffin Connected Society 29th April 2026

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Europe just proved an AI agent can complete a real bank payment — moving agentic commerce from demo to live rails.

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Months after I wrote about Coinbase developing their own agentic AI payment networks Worldline, ING and Mastercard have completed a live agentic payment transaction, demonstrating how an AI agent can assist consumers in initiating purchases. The transaction took place between an ING cardholder and a merchant in the Netherlands, using infrastructure that operates across Belgium on the Mastercard network.

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Under this system, a merchant’s AI agent searches for items within a predefined budget and presents a curated selection to the buyer. The consumer remains directly involved and must give explicit approval before the purchase proceeds.

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The AI assists with initiation, but it does not replace consumer authentication authority. ING handles the authentication and authorisation using its established security mechanisms, while Worldline processes the payment across its issuing and acquiring platforms.

The companies stated the transaction proves that agentic commerce can function securely across European payment infrastructures while maintaining transparency for the issuing bank.

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“Agentic commerce is no longer theoretical, it is production-ready today,”

said Madalena Cascais Tomé, Member of the Executive Committee at Worldline.

“For ING, this collaboration is the perfect opportunity to lay a solid foundation for our continued role as a trusted partner in an increasingly agentic future in banking,” said Hans Overeem, Head of Payments, ING Netherlands.

The pilot establishes that the required technical workflows are ready for deployment, with the companies planning to explore future use cases such as recurring transactions and delegated purchases.

Did an AI agent actually move money on its own here?
No — the agent searched and assembled the purchase, but the cardholder still had to approve it and ING handled authentication and authorisation, so the human and the bank stay firmly in control of the payment.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath." 15-time best selling author of the "Codex of the Future" series, Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working with royal households, world leaders, G7, G20, and G77 governments, NGOs, and multi-national mid and mega cap firms to help them explore, shape, and lead the next 50 years of business and society.

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