Santander Bank and Mastercard are claiming a European first after they completed a payment initiated by an artificial intelligence (AI) agent.
The financial services giants carried out a payment journey in a regulated banking framework, which began with an AI agent.
Using Mastercard Agent Pay, Santander processed the payment through its systems in real-life conditions.
Mastercard said in a statement that this was “a significant milestone in the application of AI systems capable of initiating and completing transactions on behalf of customers.”
Using the system, AI could initiate and complete payments within “predefined limits and permissions”.
Santander’s global head of cards and digital solutions, Matías Sánchez, said: “Our role is not only to adopt innovation, but to shape it responsibly, embedding security, governance and customer protection by design. As AI agents become part of everyday commerce, building trusted, scalable frameworks will be essential to unlocking their full potential.”
Santander is now set to extend testing and scaling of the process.
An AI future
Banks and card companies are investing heavily in AI to both cut costs and increase new sales opportunities.
Santander said last week that it expects its investments in AI to deliver €1bn in business value, through cost-cutting and revenue growth.
It recently said data and AI were important parts of its wider One Transformation digital programme.
At its recent investor event, Santander presented its 2026-28 plans, which included a target to increase its customer base from 180 million today to 200 million by 2028. Santander announced its planned acquisition of TSB last year, which will see the bank’s UK customer base grow by about five million.
The bank also outlined the business value that data and artificial intelligence will deliver by 2028.
It said that by 2028, it expects to generate over €1bn of business value annually, in terms of cost savings and revenues, from data and AI initiatives.
According to Lloyds Banking Group’s Financial institutions sentiment survey, 59% of surveyed firms reported AI-driven productivity gains in the past 12 months, compared with 32% in the 2024 survey.
Banks also reported rising returns from AI in other areas. The survey found that 21% of respondents believe AI is directly driving business growth, compared with 8% in the survey a year ago.
Card company innovation
Meanwhile, payment providers are on their own AI journeys. AI benchmarking firm Evident ranked Mastercard number two in its AI index for payments.
Evident co-founder Alexandra Mousavizadeh said: “Payments firms adopted AI out of necessity long before many other industries – their business models demanded it. Companies that invested early, like Visa and Mastercard, have gained a clear advantage over their peers, both in AI capabilities and the value their deployments are realising.”
Kelly Devine, president for Europe at Mastercard, said: “Agentic payments represent a profound shift in how commerce is initiated and executed.”
AI-initiated payments are another use case in the payments sector. Others include using AI to block money laundering and aid fraud detection, with Mastercard claiming fraud detection rates were up 300%.
But unlike banks, Evident said that no payments company has disclosed realised or projected ROI across all AI investments.