Mastercard has announced the successful rollout of authenticated agentic transactions across multiple ASEAN markets, alongside plans to establish a regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.
The initial deployments cover Singapore and Malaysia, with additional markets to follow, and were conducted in collaboration with UOB, an ASEAN bank, alongside local banking partners in each country.
The rollout uses Mastercard Agent Pay, which combines tokenised credentials, Mastercard Agentic Tokens, and Payment Passkeys to ensure every AI-initiated transaction is authenticated, aligned with consumer authorisation, and end-to-end auditable.
Mastercard has also introduced Verifiable Intent, a standards-based trust layer co-developed with Google, which creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorised when an AI agent acts on their behalf, serving as a shared source of truth across consumers, merchants, and issuers.
AI Centre of Excellence and regional strategy
Mastercard will launch its regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore later in 2026, combining its innovation hub, advanced cybersecurity capabilities, and AI expertise into what the company describes as its largest innovation space in the Asia Pacific. The centre is intended to strengthen governance frameworks and institutional readiness for AI-powered payments at scale across the region.
Mastercard states it has applied AI across fraud detection, cybersecurity, and real-time risk management for more than a decade, supported by over 2,000 data scientists, engineers, and consultants focused on data and AI globally.
Furthermore, the ASEAN rollout adds to Mastercard's growing portfolio of live agentic transaction deployments, which previously covered Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Latin America.
Talking about the move, Safdar Khan, Division President for Southeast Asia at Mastercard, noted that the first wave of authenticated agentic transactions demonstrates how quickly the region is embracing secure AI-enabled commerce. Adding to this, Jacquelyn Tan, Head of Group Personal Financial Services at UOB, said the multi-market collaboration combines innovation and governance to scale agentic payment capabilities across borders and sectors.
