Latvia sees first purchase made by an AI agent using a Mastercard card

Mastercard and SEB bank have carried out the first transaction in Latvia in which a purchase was made not by a person directly, but by an artificial intelligence agent acting on the customer's behalf. The transaction used the new Mastercard Agent Pay solution, designed to let AI agents make purchases for customers in a secure, transparent way based on the customer's prior consent.

In this first transaction, a customer asked an AI agent to book a spot at a coffee-tasting event listed on Mastercard's Priceless.com experience platform. The agent independently selected the event and completed payment using the customer's SEB payment card. The technical execution was handled by the PayOS platform, which connects the AI agent, the customer's payment data and the merchant, allowing the entire process — from selection to payment — to run automatically.

Security and data protection

The transaction used so-called agentic tokens, which protect confidential data and verify the customer's identity throughout the process.

Erik Gutwasser, Mastercard's head for the Nordic region, said artificial intelligence has the potential to significantly simplify everyday life, but trust and security must always come first. He noted that Agent Pay is designed to ensure AI-driven transactions remain transparent, properly authorized and under the customer's control, while also giving card issuers better oversight of transactions carried out by AI agents on customers' behalf.

Arnis Škapars, a member of SEB bank's management board, added that the transaction shows how artificial intelligence could reshape the way people shop and pay in digital environments in the future. He noted that while such solutions are still at an early stage of development, it is important to already look for ways to combine new technologies with the high standards of security, transparency and customer control that people expect from financial services.