Why the finance industry is looking to agentic AI

What if an AI assistant could do your shopping? This is agentic AI: software that doesn’t just answer queries but carries out complex tasks autonomously.

Last week, at the Money 20/20 Europe event in Amsterdam, Mastercard, Dutch bank ING and payment services company Worldline announced they had completed “Europe’s first live end-to-end agentic payment.” A shopper told an AI assistant to look for concert tickets in a certain place on a given date, within a defined budget; the assistant found options, and after the shopper selected one, it paid for them, with human approval.