Danske Bank and Mastercard have completed Denmark’s first payment in which an AI agent carried out both the purchase and the payment on behalf of a consumer, marking an early live test of agentic commerce inside a regulated Nordic bank.
In the trial, announced September 21, 2026, a customer asked an AI assistant to book a coffee tasting experience through Mastercard’s experiences platform, Priceless.com. The agent selected the session, completed the booking, and settled the charge on its own using a Mastercard card issued by Danske Bank. The transaction ran on Mastercard’s Agent Pay rails, with fintech PayOS handling the technical execution from instruction through to settlement.
Agent Pay, introduced in April 2025, is Mastercard’s infrastructure for letting verified AI systems pay on a cardholder’s behalf. Purchases are authenticated through Mastercard Payment Passkeys, a design intended to keep the customer in control throughout: consent is explicit, the transaction stays visible, and the card issuer can see that an AI agent, not the cardholder directly, initiated the payment.
“AI can help make everyday life easier, but trust and security must come first,” said Erik Gutwasser, Division President for Mastercard Northern Europe. “Agent Pay is designed to ensure that AI-powered transactions are transparent, securely authenticated and always remain under the consumer’s control. At the same time, the solution gives card issuers greater visibility into transactions initiated by AI agents. Together with partners such as Danske Bank, we are helping to lay the foundation for secure and trusted AI-powered commerce.”
Mark Wraa-Hansen, Danske Bank’s Head of Personal Banking in Denmark, said the pilot was part of the bank’s broader exploration of how customers might interact with financial services going forward. “AI-powered payments represent a new way for customers to interact with financial services,” he said, adding that Danske Bank is “exploring the possibilities of the new technology with a strong focus on customer value, trust and control.”
The test builds on Danske Bank’s wider AI push. The lender recently deepened its partnership with Amazon Web Services to expand AI capabilities through Amazon’s Bedrock platform, and piloted a Model Context Protocol server allowing corporate clients to connect their own AI assistants to bank data via premium APIs. The Priceless.com transaction represents the consumer-facing counterpart to that work.
The pilot, however, lands amid scrutiny of AI’s labor-market impact in Denmark: a September 2026 analysis by Danmarks Nationalbank found firms adopting AI are hiring fewer new employees, with younger and highly educated workers facing disproportionate effects.
At the same time, Mastercard’s recent report predicts that 1 in 10 people will routinely use AI agents to shop and pay by 2030.
