Visa and Mastercard are building the authorization layer, not the wallet

Visa's two moves

In April 2026 Visa unveiled Intelligent Commerce Connect, positioned as a network-, protocol- and token-vault-agnostic on-ramp to agentic commerce for agent builders and merchants, in pilot with partners including Aldar, AWS, Diddo, Highnote, Mesh, Payabli and Sumvin.

In June 2026 it announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to enable Visa payments inside agentic commerce experiences, bringing the network's credentialing and security infrastructure to one of the largest agent platforms.

Mastercard's framing

Mastercard has pushed the same idea through Agent Pay and its work on shared agentic protocols with Google, extending toward assistant checkout surfaces. Its public argument is explicitly about rules of the road: speed without trust is chaos, and agentic transactions need standardised expectations before they scale.

What this means for agentic wallets

Neither network is building an agent wallet. They are building the layer that decides whether an agent-initiated authorization is trustworthy, then routing it over existing card rails. That competes with on-chain settlement for consumer commerce and complements it everywhere the counterparty is a merchant rather than an API.

Crossmint's agentic cards API, built on Visa Intelligent Commerce with Basis Theory and launched in June 2026, is the clearest example of the two layers meeting: an infrastructure provider issuing agent-usable card credentials on network rails, inside an agent wallet product.

Sources

Visa — “Visa Partners with OpenAI to Power the Next Generation of AI Commerce”, 10 June 2026: https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Partners-with-OpenAI-to-Power-the-Next-Generation-of-AI-Commerce/default.aspx

Visa — “Visa Opens the Door to AI-Driven Shopping for Businesses Worldwide”, 8 April 2026: https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Opens-the-Door-to-AI-Driven-Shopping-for-Businesses-Worldwide/default.aspx

Mastercard — “The new rules of the road for agentic commerce”, January 2026: https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/stories/2026/agentic-commerce-rules-of-the-road.html

Crossmint — “Crossmint Launches Agentic Cards API Using Visa Intelligent Commerce and Basis Theory”, 2 June 2026: https://www.crossmint.com/announcement/agentic-cards-api-launch-visa-basistheory