Mastercard earned a spot on the 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list for its impact on global commerce. TIME highlighted the development of Agent Pay, a feature enabling secure payments by AI-powered agents. The company uses tokenization and real-time fraud prevention to ensure trust in these AI-driven transactions.
Mastercard also launched Merchant Trust Services to help banks and payment providers identify fraudulent merchants. The initiative uses network intelligence and real-time analytics to evaluate risk during onboarding and monitoring. This service addresses the global increase in fake online stores generated by AI.