One of the biggest trends in payments these days is agentic commerce, and the major card networks are making sure they can master the trend on behalf of banks and merchants. The payoff can be substantial. “AI is changing how commerce happens, and that leads to more transactions for Mastercard,” noted Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s chief executive, early Thursday. And now, “we expect that trend to build” as the holidays arrive, he added during a group call to discuss the network’s September-quarter results.

With momentum building this year, payments networks can’t afford to fall behind on agentic commerce, Miebach said. Yet Mastercard, as a network, must cater to a wide range of banks, processors, sellers, and other payments players, which introduces complications, given varying stages of readiness in the industry, Miebach told equity analysts on the call.

“There’s a lot of patchwork going on here, not everybody’s ready at the same time,” he said. “Merchants need to be discoverable, and not all merchants are ready. So we’re kind of ready to take off. If we get this right it will truly be the next turning point in digital commerce.” Mastercard launched Agent Suite in January, and added Agent Connect late this summer to help merchants with agentic commerce.

For merchants, discoverability will depend on both readiness and technical understanding, Miebach added. And right now, “there is a wide, wide spectrum as to where merchants are” on agentic commerce, he noted. “But we believe it will take off.” The fuel for that takeoff, he argued, will come from third-party payment-service providers. These independent players “are going to be absolutely critical on that” as they equip merchants with understanding on top of technology.

With agentic commerce, shoppers can assign software agents, or bits of code, to crawl the Web in search of products the shoppers want to buy. Controversy has arisen in recent months over the question of whether AI agents should be enabled to buy the products once they’re found or simply be restricted to discovery.

What networks like Mastercard can’t afford is a state of unreadiness among agents at the network level, Miebach warned. These days, “AI is unfortunately in the hands of fraudsters, so now [Mastercard] is in cybersecurity in a major way,” he said, adding that readiness was the goal behind Mastercard’s move to acquire Recorded Future, a provider of risk intelligence, last year for $2.65 billion.

Another business Mastercard has pursued recently is stablecoins, digital money that reflects a steady value backed by fiat money such as the U.S. dollar. A major move on that front was Mastercard’s $1.8 billion deal for BVNK, a stablecoin-technology platform that does business in more than 130 countries. The deal closed in August.

“We’re very happy [that deal] closed,” Miebach said. “It has been strong out of the gate. It’s a very different mindset coming into Mastercard.”  Perhaps more important is that BVNK “is a revenue-generating business,” he added.

For the quarter, Mastercard posted $9.81 billion in net revenue, up 14% year-over-year, while net income rose 17% to $4.65 billion. That result arrived on a 7% rise in global gross dollar volume, to $2.95 trillion, while U.S. volume grew 6% to $867 million. Mastercard and Maestro cards outstanding totaled 3.8 billion for the quarter, up 5% from a year ago