Worldline, ING, and Mastercard completed Europe's first live end-to-end agentic payment transaction in a production environment at the Money20/20 Europe event on 2 June 2026, executing an AI-initiated purchase between an ING cardholder and a Netherlands merchant across issuing and acquiring infrastructure spanning the Netherlands and Belgium.
"Agentic commerce is no longer theoretical, it is production-ready today. Powered by Worldline's platform, this transaction proves that we are fully enabled across acceptance, acquiring, authentication and issuer processing at a pan-European level," said Madalena Cascais Tomé, Member of the Executive Committee at Worldline. Hans Overeem, Head of Payments at ING Netherlands, framed the collaboration as laying "a solid foundation for our continued role as a trusted partner in an increasingly agentic future in banking."
The transaction demonstrates what the payments industry calls "agentic commerce," in which software agents perform parts of the shopping and payment workflow on behalf of consumers within predefined limits. In the published example, an ING customer searched online for a wedding anniversary gift; a merchant AI agent then selected concert tickets within the customer's stated budget, displayed the options, and completed the payment only after receiving confirmation from the customer.
While AI-driven commerce has been a recurring Money20/20 theme, this pilot marks the first time all four layers — merchant-side AI initiation, customer approval, payment authentication, and issuer authorisation — have been combined on live Mastercard rails in a European production environment. Mastercard has been developing its Agent Pay framework for AI-enabled payment orchestration and authentication; Worldline's role is to provide the pan-European processing fabric bridging issuing banks and merchants.
Authentication and authorisation ran through existing payment security mechanisms, with ING acting as the issuing bank and Worldline processing the transaction across both its issuing and acquiring platforms. The transaction record itself carried identifiers flagging that the payment had been initiated through an agentic process, while the issuing bank retained visibility and authorisation control throughout the flow.
Worldline reported approximately €4 billion in 2025 revenue and serves more than 1.2 million customers across Europe through payment processing and transactional infrastructure for merchants and financial institutions. ING employs more than 60,000 people globally and provides retail and wholesale banking services in more than 100 countries through ING Bank and its affiliated operations. The pilot was designed to test operational workflows for agentic payments across multiple European markets and payment participants.
According to the three companies, future use cases under exploration include recurring payments and delegated purchases within predefined consumer permissions. "We are seeing the next evolution of digital commerce, where trusted agents can act on behalf of consumers in a secure and transparent way," said Brice van de Walle, Executive Vice President of Core Payments Europe at Mastercard — signalling that the Netherlands–Belgium pilot is positioned as a starting point for broader European rollout rather than a standalone demonstration.