en.Wedoany.com Reported - Singapore-based digital payment platform Sunrate and Mastercard jointly released the white paper "Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments" at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). This is one of the first reports in the payment industry to explore the impact of agentic AI on B2B cross-border payments.
The white paper proposes that cross-border payments are transitioning from the stages of digitalization and automation into a new "autonomous" phase, where AI agents with reasoning, planning, and execution capabilities can independently orchestrate and optimize end-to-end payment and treasury workflows within established governance frameworks. The report notes that while traditional automation has improved individual tasks, agentic AI represents a fundamental shift by enabling intelligent agents to coordinate the entire payment process across systems, counterparties, and approval workflows.
Based on Sunrate's global payment infrastructure and AI-native product capabilities, as well as Mastercard's expertise in secure payment networks and data intelligence, the white paper defines "agentic global payments"—a new type of AI-native global payment infrastructure designed to automate and manage complex enterprise workflows. The report identifies 16 major pain points in the B2B payment lifecycle and outlines 13 high-value AI use cases, covering supplier onboarding, accounts payable and receivable, virtual commercial cards, payment routing, foreign exchange management, compliance screening, fraud detection, reconciliation, and conversational operational support. The white paper also demonstrates how AI agents can automate complex workflows within enterprise governance and control frameworks, including extracting information from multiple document formats, conducting compliance checks, initiating payments, optimizing foreign exchange execution, and completing reconciliation.
The white paper emphasizes that trusted adoption of agentic payments relies on governance, transparency, security, and ecosystem collaboration, supported by frameworks such as "Know Your Agent" (KYA), payment tokenization, auditability, and cross-industry interoperability. Sunrate.AI's product portfolio currently includes Payment Agent, FX Agent, Compliance Agent, Onboarding Agent, and Chat Agent, designed to automate and optimize key payment and treasury processes. Mastercard is also actively building the foundation for trusted agentic commerce, with related efforts including Agent Pay, Agent Pay for Machines, and Verifiable Intent.
"Our mission is to make global payments seamless, compliant, and intelligent," said Paul Meng, Co-founder and CEO of Sunrate. "As enterprises continue to expand internationally, AI agents will fundamentally reshape how businesses manage global payments—enabling smoother capital flows, reducing operational friction, and embedding real-time intelligence into every payment decision. This white paper is an important step in helping the industry understand how to responsibly deploy agentic AI at enterprise scale."
"Agentic commerce is changing how businesses make and execute payment decisions, but speed without accountability introduces new categories of risk," said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President of Commercial and New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific at Mastercard. "As AI begins to act on behalf of businesses, autonomous payment decisions require a clear, auditable chain of identity, intent, and action. This allows organizations to truly authorize with confidence—and will determine whether agentic commerce can scale beyond the pilot phase."
Released under the WAIC 2026 theme "Intelligent Partners, Creating the Future Together," the white paper provides business leaders with a practical guide to adopting AI-driven payment capabilities, covering implementation methods, governance considerations, and real-world enterprise applications. By combining Sunrate's expertise in global payments and treasury management with Mastercard's trusted payment infrastructure and network capabilities, this collaboration reflects a shared commitment to accelerating the next generation of intelligent, secure, and autonomous B2B global payments.
