Investors seem jittery about President Trump’s support of a measure that would require a lower-cost alternative for credit-card routing.

Fidelity National Information Services has joined with the card networks to enable banks to work with shopping agents driven by artificial intelligence.

A proposed legal settlement between Visa, Mastercard and U.S. merchants could soon change how some shoppers pay at checkout.

Meanwhile, the company continues to send a lot of cash back to shareholders. In fiscal 2025, Visa returned $22.8 billion through share repurchases and dividends. The bulk of this capital return was in the form of share repurchases during fiscal 2025. Visa repurchased $18.2 billion worth of its own stock.

“If those agents are ultimately going to do autonomous buying, consumers have to trust them,” Klenoff says. “That means standards, governance and layers of security.” Mastercard is already working on what it describes as agentic pay – systems that allow AI agents to transact securely on a consumer’s behalf.

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Mastercard has announced a collaboration with Google on its Universal Commerce Protocol to boost secure, intuitive & flexible agentic commerce experiences

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Through the enhanced partnership, Fiserv will adopt Mastercard’s Agent Pay Acceptance Framework, which establishes a secure system for allowing AI agents to make purchases on a cardholder’s behalf.

With fintechs and legal cases pressuring payment fees, the card companies are leaning more on revenue from other sources.