Sunrate 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 how Agentic AI affects B2B cross-border payments. It argues that cross-border payments are moving past digitisation and automation into a new stage the paper calls Autonomy, where AI agents with reasoning, planning, and execution capabilities independently orchestrate and optimise end-to-end payment and treasury workflows within defined governance frameworks.
Pain Points And Use Cases
The white paper identifies 16 major pain points across the B2B payment lifecycle. It also outlines 13 high-value AI use cases spanning supplier onboarding, accounts payable and receivable, virtual commercial cards, payment routing, foreign exchange management, compliance screening, fraud detection, reconciliation, and conversational operational support.
The report shows how AI agents can extract information across multiple document formats, run compliance checks, initiate payments, optimise FX execution, and complete reconciliation, while operating inside enterprise governance and control frameworks.
Trusted adoption, the paper states, depends on more than technological capability. It points to governance, transparency, security, and ecosystem collaboration as necessary foundations for enterprise deployment, supported by frameworks including Know Your Agent (KYA), payment tokenisation, auditability, and cross-industry interoperability.
Company Capabilities
Sunrate.AI’s current portfolio includes a Payment Agent, FX Agent, Compliance Agent, Onboarding Agent, and Chat Agent, built to help enterprises automate and manage payment and treasury processes.
“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.”
Mastercard’s contributions to agentic commerce include Agent Pay, Agent Pay for Machines, and Verifiable Intent, which combine AI capabilities with verifiable authorisation, accountability, and payments security.
Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial & New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific, at Mastercard, noted: “Agentic commerce is changing how businesses make and execute payment decisions, but speed without accountability creates new categories of risk. 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.”
The white paper was released under WAIC 2026’s theme, “Intelligent Partners, Co-creating the Future.” It offers business leaders guidance on adopting AI-driven payment capabilities, covering implementation approaches, governance considerations, and enterprise applications.
Sunrate, founded in 2016, operates in more than 190 countries and regions and is a principal member of Mastercard and Visa. The white paper is available for download on Sunrate’s website.
