Mastercard and Visa are both building multi-coin, multi-chain infrastructure to capture machine-to-machine payments, a volume category that doesn't exist on any network today. Miebach called BVNK the largest stablecoin platform and expects the acquisition to close Q3 2026, positioning Mastercard as the trust layer above all competing rails. Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Visa didn't make the cut.
Grab the names FREE today. On a recent Motley Fool Conversations episode, Mastercard's CEO Michael Miebach outlined a payments future for the company that goes well beyond its core credit card business. He described how AI shopping agents could lift transaction volume, then pivoted to the genuinely new category of machine-to-machine transactions, where companies pay each other for digital goods like compute power, APIs, and data in real time, at micro-fractions of a dollar, without invoices.
For Mastercard (NYSE:MA), a network built on card rails, that could represent both an opportunity and a major shift in the company's business model. Mastercard's CEO was careful in how he presented the growth opportunities. He argued that even if AI agents eventually direct their own spending, it's likely that consumer needs will stay somewhat fixed, meaning there would be a cap on the GDP lift driven by AI agents.
However, B2B machine-to-machine payments would represent an entirely new payment volume category that does not exist today. That framing is important because the bullish case for agentic commerce often gets sold in a simplified "AI agents doing more things means more spending," but there's likely some limits around how much more gets spent within the economy. The more defensible thesis is that machines transacting with machines create a payment stream that was never on any network.
Mastercard's answer is a protocol it calls "AgentPay for Machines" (AP4M), designed to handle "always-on, high-velocity, micro fractions of a dollar kind of payments." On the Q2 2026 earnings call, Michael Miebach put a finer point on the ecosystem, saying "Mastercard is the only network enabling machine-to-machine payments" and citing launch partners including Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and OKEx. The most striking part of the podcast was how openly Mastercard is embracing non-card rails. The CEO called BVNK "the largest stablecoin platform out there," and said the acquisition is closing this quarter.
He acknowledged the underlying infrastructure "could be stablecoin" and that Mastercard is "pretty agnostic about that." On the earnings call, Miebach expanded the vision, saying Mastercard expects "a world of multiplicity, many coins, many chains, and all of that needs a trusted interoperable layer... And that is what BVNK will do for us." He was also candid that "Stablecoin isn't the answer to everything because you still need protections, you still need acceptance, and you still need to kind of find your way into fiat." Mastercard wants to be the trust, interoperability, and fiat on-ramp sitting above whichever rails win. Mastercard has the earnings power to fund this build.
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