Visa and Mastercard are accelerating efforts to commercialize agentic artificial intelligence for banks and businesses, aiming to automate complex tasks and open new revenue streams beyond card swipes. Visa is partnering with ServiceNow to embed agentic artificial intelligence into payment dispute handling for card issuers, while Mastercard is introducing a suite of virtual executive tools for small and medium sized businesses under a new Virtual C-Suite offering. Both networks are positioning these tools as augmenting human decision making rather than fully replacing staff, reflecting rising interest across financial services in using agentic artificial intelligence to manage high volume, labor intensive workflows.
Through the Visa collaboration, ServiceNow is deploying an agentic artificial intelligence system that supports the full payment dispute lifecycle, from triage and prioritization to documentation. Artificial intelligence agents are trained to detect low value disputes, rank cases using merchant data and historical trends, and identify potential compliance risks earlier in investigations. ServiceNow uses its internal large language model along with historical data such as the number of disputes a consumer may have filed over a certain period of time and details of the consumer’s tenure with the bank, with the artificial intelligence focused on analyzing data and recommending actions to human agents rather than autonomously resolving cases. Research from Visa and ServiceNow found issuers write off an average of $3.3 million per year and spend more than 360 hours annually on audit preparation, while Mastercard projects global chargeback volume will expand 24% from 2025 to 2028, reaching 324 million transactions annually, and each dispute costs financial institutions $9.08 to $10.32 to process on average.
Industry consultants describe legacy fraud and dispute processes as fragmented, manual and unable to keep pace with rising first party fraud, and argue that emerging artificial intelligence driven platforms can rapidly analyze transaction histories, customer behavior and supporting documents to assess claim legitimacy and recommend next steps. Mastercard is extending that artificial intelligence approach beyond disputes with its Virtual C-Suite, which creates artificial intelligence agents for roles such as finance, security and marketing. The service provides dashboards and interfaces that let business owners ask direct questions, with a virtual chief financial officer as the first module and additional roles planned. Mastercard is targeting small and medium sized firms that often lack large management teams, and the push comes as PwC reports nearly 80% of businesses are adopting agentic artificial intelligence in some form.
