Mastercard chief executive Michael Miebach says the payments giant has moved away from competing alone and now prioritizes collaboration across the payments ecosystem. Since taking over as CEO in January 2021, Miebach has steered the company toward partnerships at a time when new technologies are reshaping how people buy goods and services.
The shift is visible in the company's finances. Mastercard's revenue grew from $18.9 billion in 2021 to $32.8 billion in 2025, and analysts expect revenue to exceed $37 billion in 2026. The business has also diversified beyond card payments into data and insights, digital identity, and stablecoins.
A central focus is what the industry calls agentic commerce, in which AI agents research products and negotiate deals on behalf of users. Researching products with an agent is already well established, but completing a transaction through one remains harder. Mastercard treats these agents as an additional partner within its ecosystem rather than a threat to its network.
The company has begun building that infrastructure. Agent Pay launched in the United States in early 2025 to handle checkout, and Agent Pay for Machines followed in June with 31 participants. Mastercard is not alone in the effort, as rival payment protocols and industry coalitions are also emerging to define how agent-driven purchases should work.
Miebach expects the industry to converge on common standards eventually, though he has not said when that will happen or which approach will prevail. He points to the history of mobile payments as a guide. Apple Pay took more than five years to become nearly ubiquitous, and today about 80 percent of Mastercard's in-person transactions are contactless. By comparison, agentic purchases remain a tiny share of the roughly 180 billion transactions the company processes each year.
For agentic commerce to gain trust, Miebach has said the industry will need tools to verify agents, monitor for fraud, and allow consumers to challenge purchases they did not authorize. Whether the sector will scale quickly once standards align remains an open question.
Miebach's approach also reflects a personal change. He says he now favors collaboration over pure differentiation and is more comfortable operating without ready answers, a mindset he attributes in part to leading through the pandemic. In a June 2021 interview at Mastercard's headquarters, held while masks were still required, he described that evolution as central to how he runs the company.