Powering autonomous payments

The next era of commerce will look very different from today’s.

AI agents will handle tasks we once treated as manual: renewing subscriptions, managing disputes, routing transactions, rebalancing accounts and even resolving exceptions. The shift from “assistive AI” to “agentic AI” is already underway.

But unlocking that future requires one thing above all else: context.

MCP is the foundation of agentic commerce

Worldpay’s Model Context Protocol is designed to give AI agents secure access to the live data, actions and operational workflows they need to transact on a merchant’s behalf. It’s interoperability for the agent age.

Once an AI agent can understand a payment flow, read current configurations and take action within guardrails, the possibilities grow quickly.

What’s coming next

MCP opens the door to a new class of intelligent, autonomous payment experiences:

Autonomous checkout

AI agents that initiate, authorise and complete purchases with minimal human input – while applying the merchant’s rules for compliance, fraud and routing.

Example – checkout recovery: A customer’s payment fails due to a temporary network issue.

With MCP: An AI agent instantly detects the decline, retries the payment using an alternate route and confirms the order without human intervention.

Smarter subscription management

Agents that update credentials, adjust billing cycles, retry failed payments or trigger alternative routes without waiting for a customer to intervene.

Intelligent workflow automation

Real-time exception handling. Case resolution. Risk signals that adjust in the moment. AI that sees friction and acts before customers notice.

Operational control for merchant teams

Merchant-operations staff gain a single interface to configure flows, test changes and deploy new rules without depending on engineering sprints. Developers define the guardrails. Operations teams run the day-to-day.

Global scale with predictable performance

With Worldpay’s reach – 135 currencies, 1 million merchants, 52 billion annual transactions – agents can execute actions consistently across markets.

Why openness matters in this next chapter

Agentic commerce won’t be defined by a single platform. It will be defined by the power of an ecosystem.

MCP’s open design ensures AI agents can integrate across merchant stacks, partner platforms and payment networks without friction. That flexibility will determine which experiences scale globally and which stay stuck in pilot mode.

The road ahead

For Worldpay, MCP is not the finish line. It’s the starting point of a larger evolution – one where merchants gain the tools to automate intelligently, operate with agility and grow without adding complexity.

Our mission remains the same: Unleash the potential of every business. With MCP, we’re helping merchants do exactly that – one intelligent, context-aware workflow at a time.