Visa and Mastercard want AI to do your online shopping for you

Giants of the swipe-tap-insert ecosystem are looking for bot assistance to maintain their grip on global payments.

5/1/25 10:58AM

In the announcement for its new “Agent Pay” product on Tuesday, Mastercard envisaged a world where a 29-year-old woman enlists the help of one of its chatbots to pick out her 30th birthday party outfit and accessories, based on “her style, the venue’s ambience, and weather forecast.”

But if you only have a card provided by the other giant of the payment world — don’t panic! Similarly life-changing features were announced from Visa just one day later, with the company unveiling “a new era of commerce” with its Visa Intelligence Commerce initiative on Wednesday.

While both products will rely pretty heavily on existing AI agent tech and models from companies like Microsoft, IBM, Anthropic, and OpenAI, the timing of the announcements is a pretty telling sign of where the powers that be in the payments landscape think e-commerce is heading.

The swipe economy

For decades, Visa and Mastercard have been the main highways of the payments world, facilitating some 4 trillion transactions between them since 2010 — and taking a healthy toll for themselves with every swipe and tap.

The two card juggernauts handled ~65% of the estimated 724 billion global card transactions in 2023, even as rivals like UnionPay in China continue to gain ground.

Visa and mastercard market share — Sherwood News

The timing of the two announcements may do little to assuage concerns that the dominance of the two companies is tantamount to a duopoly — especially in the domestic US market, where they controlled some 80% of the market last year, per data from Nilson Report. Indeed, regulators are beginning to push back on their supremacy in the US, with the DOJ suing Visa last September.

Nia Warfield

Fox and News Corp slide as investors digest $3.3 billion Murdoch succession settlement

Fox and News Corp shares dropped on Tuesday after Rupert Murdoch’s heirs agreed to a $3.3 billion settlement to resolve a long-running succession drama.

Under the deal, Prudence, Elisabeth, and James Murdoch will each receive about $1.1 billion, paid for in part by Fox selling 16.9 million Class B voting shares and News Corp selling 14.2 million shares. The stock sales will raise roughly $1.37 billion on behalf of the three heirs.

The new trust for Lachlan Murdoch will now control about 36.2% of Fox’s Class B shares and roughly 33.1% of News Corp’s stock, granting him uncontested voting authority over both companies for the next 25 years. Originally, the Murdoch trust was designed to hand over voting control of Fox and News Corp to Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James after his death.

Investors are weighing the trade-off. Clear leadership under Lachlan may resolve conflict internally, but the share dilution, executed at a roughly 4.5% discount, means long-term investors now hold slightly less clout than before.

Both companies’ stocks were trading close to all-time highs prior to the announcement.

385 ✈️ 434

Max Knoblauch

Boeing on Tuesday announced that it delivered 57 commercial jets in August, its best total for the month in seven years. That brings its year-to-date delivery total to 385 planes, eclipsing its full-year 2024 figure by about 11%.

The August figure marked Boeing’s second-highest delivery total of 2025 and represented a 43% jump from the same month last year. Through August, Boeing has boosted its deliveries by 50% from last year.

The plane maker is still trailing its European rival Airbus, which delivered 61 planes in August and 434 year to date.

Nia Warfield

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Tariffs finally crept into retail's latest earnings results. Who were the winners and losers?

The long-awaited levies took a toll on nearly every retailer, but execution separated who could steer through the costs.