Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Mastercard, Flybits Complete AI Purchase With Rogers Bank
September 21, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | Artificial Intelligence And Data, Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Banking And Credit Infrastructure, Risk Compliance And Regtech
Flybits AI Agent Buys With Rogers Card Using Agent Pay
On September 21, 2026, Mastercard Canada, Toronto based Flybits and Rogers Bank announced a Mastercard Agent Pay purchase completed by an AI shopping assistant using a Rogers Red Mastercard. Mastercard describes it as Canada's first successful deployment connecting an AI commerce platform, card issuer and payment network.
The customer gave the Flybits powered assistant instructions and a spending limit. The agent found an eligible product within those conditions and completed the purchase using Mastercard Agent Pay. Flybits supplied the AI shopping experience and explainability around the selection, Rogers Bank supplied the card relationship, and Mastercard handled the payment through its network.
The AI went beyond recommending a product. It entered the payment process after the customer had already set the buying instructions and budget. Mastercard says the purchase was completed, although they didn't mention the merchant, transaction amount, exact payment credential or settlement details.
It's a Rogers Bank service that is still being tested and is not yet available to customers. Having said that, the companies describe a successful deployment and say further phases are planned. One completed transaction shows the workflow can function with a real issuer and payment network, but not yet if it can handle thousands of customers and merchants at scale including handling disputes.
Mastercard Agent Pay Limits What the AI Can Spend
Card networks already know how to authorize card payments. Agentic commerce adds a new control problem because the issuer and merchant need to know that the software had permission to make the purchase and stayed within the customer's instructions. Mastercard says the consumer's instructions were validated in this transaction and the agent operated within a predefined spending limit.
The agent wasn't given an open right to spend against the card. Mastercard hasn't disclosed whether the customer approved the exact product again before checkout, how long the authority remained active, whether permission could be revoked after the instruction was issued or how much detail the customer could inspect before payment. Those details become important once consumers allow software to make more of the buying decision for them.
Mastercard Agent Pay is built to keep the consumer, software agent and payment credential identifiable inside the transaction. That can give issuers and merchants a record of which customer granted authority, which agent acted and whether the payment stayed within the customer's conditions. Once software starts buying instead of only recommending, those records become part of the payment control.
See: AI Agents Gain Identity and Wallet Access WCGW
Flybits handled the AI shopping experience. Its software interpreted the customer's request, selected a product and provided an explanation for that choice. If the purchase is disputed later, the bank may need to see what the customer asked for, why the agent chose that item and whether it stayed within the approved budget.
Mastercard also offers Agent Connect to link AI agents with merchants and payment providers. The Rogers Bank and Flybits transaction goes a step further by showing an AI agent using a Canadian issued card to complete a purchase.
Flybits also plans to use Mastercard Insight Tokens in later phases. These are designed to let an AI agent use approved customer information without giving it unrestricted access to raw data. They were not part of the September 21 transaction.
Rogers Purchase Prioritizes AI Payment Liability
Existing card protections still apply to the payment underneath the AI experience. Rogers Bank and Mastercard continue to operate within fraud, dispute and network rules.
What happens when a customer genuinely authorizes software to spend but later argues that the agent misunderstood the request, chose the wrong product or bought something outside what the customer intended.
A customer might tell an agent to buy an eligible product for less than C$100 and receive a C$95 item that fits the budget but misses an important preference. The card credential may have been used legitimately and the amount may stay inside the approved ceiling, yet the customer can still dispute what the software decided to buy. That is very different from resolving a stolen card number or account takeover.
Today's announcement doesn't establish new liability rules for that situation. It also doesn't explain how responsibility would be divided among the consumer, Flybits, Rogers Bank, Mastercard and the merchant if valid payment credentials were used but the agent acted outside the customer's intended instructions. Earlier NCFA analysis of AI payment consent reached the same operating issue from the regulatory side: delegated software needs clear limits around what the user has actually authorized.
That makes transaction records commercially important. An issuer may need evidence showing who authenticated the request, which agent acted, what instructions were active, what spending ceiling applied and what the software ultimately purchased. Merchants need similar visibility to separate legitimate shopping agents from fraud bots and automated abuse. Mastercard Canada's Craig Reiff summarized the commercial constraint directly when he said “trust will determine how quickly these experiences scale.”
See: Nuvei and Visa Complete Agent Payment
Mastercard isn't working on this problem alone. Visa is developing agent payment controls, while Stripe and Google are building infrastructure that lets software agents transact within defined permissions. Canada already has another live reference point. In July, Nuvei completed a Visa agentic commerce proof of concept using a tokenized Visa credential and live payment rails, with planned controls including Know Your Agent checks and agent risk scoring. That transaction involved a merchant AI agent, so it isn't the same consumer shopping use case as today's Rogers Bank purchase.
For Canadian banks and fintechs, the Rogers transaction brings agent authority into an operating card flow. A regulated issuer has now participated in a purchase where software interpreted customer instructions, selected a product and proceeded to payment within a spending ceiling. That gives banks something concrete to assess across fraud controls, audit records, customer consent and dispute handling.
Mastercard's August survey found that 41% of 2,000 Canadian adults were open to using AI assistants for online shopping. Among respondents who already felt positively about AI shopping assistants, 53% were open to AI assisted purchasing within preset preferences and budgets. That second figure applies to the favourable subgroup rather than all Canadians, and the research was commissioned by Mastercard.
Talking Point
The Rogers Bank transaction shows that an AI agent can select a product and complete a card purchase inside a customer defined spending limit. However, when an agent buys something the customer didn't expect, can the payment record prove what the customer actually authorized and who is responsible for the decision?
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