Mastercard has opened the latest edition of its Innovation Circuit workshop at the Mastercard Experience Center in Singapore, using a motor racing theme to walk financial institutions, fintechs and merchants through what agentic commerce and digital identity could look like by 2030.

The fourth edition of the immersive programme, titled “Next Lap in Payments,” is hosted at Mastercard’s flagship Asia Pacific innovation hub, one of seven such centres worldwide. It brings together co-creation sessions on agentic commerce, trusted digital identity, tokenisation, interoperability and AI-driven network intelligence, aimed at helping partners prepare for a payment ecosystem the company describes as trusted, interoperable, data-driven, secure and convenient.

Three Pitstops Across the Payments Journey

The workshop is structured around three sessions, each mapped to a stage of the commerce journey. “Igniting Innovation” covers trust and identity foundations, including biometric onboarding, tokenised credential-sharing and consent-driven identity models that let consumers authorise AI agents to act on their behalf while retaining control over their data.

“Shifting Gears” follows a sports fan through ticketing, merchandise and payments, showing how AI-powered shopping and concierge agents can coordinate bookings, location-aware alerts and merchandise purchases across multiple merchants in real time. The final session, “Powering Growth,” traces a single transaction data point through fraud detection, approval optimisation and insight generation, with an emphasis on preserving privacy at each step.

Regional Relevance for Asia Pacific

The programme’s Singapore staging positions the city as Mastercard’s testing ground for how identity, tokenisation, fraud prevention and payments innovation intersect for regional partners. The motor racing framing draws on Mastercard’s sponsorship of the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 team, cast here as a metaphor for the speed and precision the company argues future payments infrastructure will need.

“As new technologies reshape how people discover, choose and pay, organizations need to understand how to make the commerce experience trusted, scalable and commercially viable,” said Matthew Driver, Executive Vice President, Services, Asia Pacific, Mastercard. “The Mastercard Experience Center in Singapore gives partners a practical way to connect the dots across identity, tokenization, fraud prevention and payments innovation, and explore what those capabilities could mean for their customers, operations and growth.”

The initiative arrives as AI agents increasingly influence how consumers discover products and complete transactions, a shift Mastercard says raises new questions around security, consumer control and scalability across the region’s payment networks.