Visa, Mastercard aren’t worried about overlapping protocols

Visa and Mastercard see overlapping or competing payment and “agentic commerce” protocols as manageable and even healthy, because they expect interoperability rather than a single winner-take-all standard.

What “overlapping protocols” refers to

• In late 2025, multiple players (Visa, Mastercard, Google, OpenAI, PayPal, Stripe) released frameworks for AI agents that can shop and pay on behalf of users, creating a “protocol soup” for agent‑initiated commerce.

• At the same time, both card networks are also rolling out their own tokenization and remote‑commerce frameworks (e.g., Visa’s secure remote commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard’s tokenization and AI tools), which coexist with each other and with industry standards.

Why they say they’re not worried

• Visa’s CEO has emphasized “building interoperability” between Visa’s agentic protocol and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, signalling that Visa expects different schemes to work together rather than fight a standards war.​

• Mastercard has publicly welcomed a range of standards, framing multiple protocols as increasing flexibility so long as they can interoperate across networks, wallets, and merchants.

Strategic reasons behind that stance

• Both networks already run in highly heterogeneous environments (different issuers, acquirers, wallets, and local schemes), so supporting multiple technical formats is part of their core value proposition.

• Tokenization and AI risk tools give them leverage at the infrastructure layer: if they control the rails and data models, they benefit regardless of which front‑end or agent protocol an app uses.

Practical implications for merchants and developers

• In the near term, merchants and PSPs may see more integration work, as they need to support several tokenization and agent protocols across Visa, Mastercard, and big tech platforms.

• Over time, the networks expect convergence via shared standards bodies (IETF, OpenID Foundation, EMVCo) and “no‑code” or low‑code integrations, reducing fragmentation at checkout while preserving multiple coexisting protocols under the hood.