Sunrate, a global payment and treasury management platform, and Mastercard jointly released a white paper titled “Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments” at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. The paper proposes a new category of payment infrastructure where AI agents with reasoning, planning, and execution capabilities independently orchestrate end-to-end B2B cross-border payment workflows.
The Framework
The white paper argues that cross-border payments are evolving beyond digitisation and automation into what the authors call “Autonomy,” a stage where agents coordinate entire payment journeys across systems, counterparties, and approval workflows. It identifies 16 pain points across the B2B payment lifecycle, including fragmented workflows, disconnected systems, FX inefficiencies, and rising compliance requirements, and maps 13 high-value AI use cases spanning supplier onboarding, accounts payable and receivable, payment routing, FX management, compliance screening, fraud detection, and reconciliation.
The practical scope is specific: agents that extract information across document formats, conduct compliance checks, initiate payments, optimize FX execution, and complete reconciliation, all operating within enterprise governance constraints.
Governance as the Bottleneck
The paper’s core argument is that trusted adoption depends on governance, not capability. It introduces a “Know Your Agent” (KYA) framework alongside payment tokenisation and auditability requirements as prerequisites for enterprise deployment. The position mirrors a broader industry consensus forming around agent accountability: if an AI agent initiates a payment on behalf of a company, there needs to be a verifiable chain of identity, intent, and action.
“As AI starts to act on behalf of businesses, autonomous payment decisions need a clear, auditable chain of identity, intent and action,” said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President for Commercial and New Payment Flows in Asia Pacific at Mastercard. “That’s what allows organisations to delegate with genuine confidence, and what will determine whether agentic commerce scales past pilots.”
Existing Products
Both companies have products in market. Sunrate’s AI portfolio includes a Payment Agent, FX Agent, Compliance Agent, Onboarding Agent, and Chat Agent, according to the press release. Mastercard has been building Agent Pay (including Agent Pay for Machines) and a “Verifiable Intent” system for agent-initiated transactions.
Paul Meng, Co-founder and CEO of Sunrate, said the white paper “represents an important step in helping the industry understand how Agentic AI can be deployed responsibly at enterprise scale.”
The Payments Stack Race
The release comes during a week where agent payment infrastructure has been a recurring theme. The x402 Foundation, backed by Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, recently launched under the Linux Foundation to standardize HTTP 402 for agent-initiated transactions. Nuggets shipped its Authority Control Plane for cryptographic agent authorization. Lightning Labs released Wavelength for non-custodial Bitcoin payments by AI agents.
The distinction in this white paper is scope: where those projects focus on transaction protocols and authorization mechanics, Sunrate and Mastercard are mapping the full operational lifecycle of B2B payments and arguing that agents need governance frameworks before they need faster rails.