Mastercard has grown revenue from $18.9 billion in 2021 to $32.8 billion in 2025, and analysts expect the figure to exceed $37 billion in 2026. Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach attributes part of that trajectory to a deliberate shift in how he leads: from competing in isolation to competing through collaboration.

Miebach, who became CEO in January 2021, has diversified the company beyond consumer credit cards into data, insights, digital identities and stablecoins. He discussed his evolution as a leader in a recent interview with Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures, who first interviewed him at Mastercard headquarters in June 2021, when pandemic-era masking and social distancing were still standard.

What changed in Miebach's leadership philosophy?

Before his promotion, Miebach served as chief product officer, a role he describes as "just doing stuff for us." The CEO job forced a broader perspective on how the payments ecosystem functions.

"It comes down to changing [my] mindset from 'I want to compete and differentiate only' to 'I want to compete and collaborate,'" Miebach said. He has also grown more comfortable with ambiguity. COVID-19, he said, taught him to lead without a playbook, and the pace of technological change means leaders rarely hold all the answers.

"I can [operate] much better with not having an answer," Miebach said of his mindset today.

How is Mastercard building agentic commerce?

Miebach says cross-industry cooperation is central to the company's work on agentic commerce, in which artificial intelligence agents find optimal products on behalf of humans. The agents excel at research and even negotiating deals, but completing transactions has proven more elusive.

Mastercard's answer is to treat AI agents as an additional partner in a payments ecosystem that traditionally consists of four parties:

• The cardholder
• The bank that issues the card
• The merchant
• The acquiring bank, which allows the merchant to accept payments

Card networks such as Mastercard and Visa link these parties together.

The company launched Mastercard Agent Pay in the U.S. in early 2025 to integrate AI agents into checkout. In June, it followed with Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), designed to let agents transact with other agents continuously and at very high speeds. Mastercard announced AP4M alongside 31 participants, many of them fintech companies, underscoring the role of partnership in the initiative.

When will agentic purchases scale?

Miebach believes the broader payments ecosystem will eventually coalesce around a common set of standards, much as companies converged around the Apple Pay digital wallet, introduced in 2014. That convergence took time: Apple Pay needed more than half a decade to approach ubiquity, yet today 80% of Mastercard's in-person transactions globally are contactless.

Agentic purchases currently represent a "tiny" share of the 180 billion transactions Mastercard processes annually. Miebach expects acceleration once industry players align on regulations, technical standards, loyalty points integrations and, crucially, systems that build consumer trust.

Those trust systems include:

• "Know your agent" software that verifies an AI agent is acting on behalf of a customer
• Fraud monitoring
• The ability to challenge unauthorized purchases

Competing coalitions and standards are already forming in the agentic commerce space, including rival payments protocols for payment authorization.

Is agentic commerce real yet?

For Miebach, the concept is not theoretical. During the recent meeting, he said he had used an agent that same day to make a purchase: printer paper. The item was neither exciting nor expensive, but, he said, "It worked."