Sunrate, the global payment and treasury management platform, and Mastercard have released a joint white paper, Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments, at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
The report is among the first in the payments industry to examine Agentic AI in B2B cross-border payments. Its central claim: payments are moving past digitisation and automation into autonomy, where AI agents with reasoning, planning, and execution capabilities orchestrate end-to-end payment and treasury workflows within defined governance frameworks.
B2B cross-border payments remain hampered by fragmented workflows, disconnected systems, FX inefficiencies, rising compliance demands, and complex reconciliation. Traditional automation fixes individual tasks. Agentic AI, the paper argues, coordinates entire payment journeys across systems, counterparties, and approval workflows.
The paper defines Agentic Global Payments as a new category of AI-native payment infrastructure for complex enterprise workflows. It identifies 16 pain points across the B2B payment lifecycle and 13 high-value AI use cases, covering supplier onboarding, accounts payable and receivable, virtual commercial cards, payment routing, FX management, compliance screening, fraud detection, reconciliation, and conversational operational support.
Trusted adoption depends on more than technology. The report names governance, transparency, security, and ecosystem collaboration as prerequisites for enterprise deployment, backed by frameworks such as Know Your Agent (KYA), payment tokenisation, auditability, and cross-industry interoperability.
Sunrate’s AI portfolio includes the Payment Agent, FX Agent, Compliance Agent, Onboarding Agent, and Chat Agent. Mastercard’s agentic commerce work includes Agent Pay, Agent Pay for Machines, and Verifiable Intent.
“Our mission is to make global payments seamless, compliant, and intelligent,” said Paul Meng, Co-founder and CEO of Sunrate. “As businesses continue expanding internationally, AI agents will fundamentally reshape how enterprises manage global payments—enabling smoother capital flows, reducing operational friction, and embedding real-time intelligence into every payment decision. This white paper represents an important step in helping the industry understand how Agentic AI can be deployed responsibly at enterprise scale.”
“Agentic commerce is changing how businesses make and execute payment decisions, but speed without accountability creates new categories of risk,” said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial & New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific, Mastercard. “As AI starts to act on behalf of businesses, autonomous payment decisions need a clear, auditable chain of identity, intent and action. That’s what allows organisations to delegate with genuine confidence — and what will determine whether agentic commerce scales past pilots.”
Released under WAIC 2026’s theme, Intelligent Partners, Co-creating the Future, the paper gives business leaders practical guidance on implementation, governance, and enterprise applications.