Sunrate Launches Agentic Card So AI Agents Can Make Business Payments

A virtual card built for AI agents

According to Sunrate, the Agentic Card differs from conventional virtual commercial cards, which are designed mainly for human users. Authorised AI agents can create and manage payment instruments, initiate transactions and retrieve payment outcomes, while the business keeps control over spending limits, permissions and approval policies.

The company says the Mastercard Agent Pay certification provides a foundation for verifiable identity and authorisation for agent-initiated transactions within the Mastercard network.

Sunrate describes the launch as a step in moving AI from assisting with financial decisions towards executing authorised payment tasks with built-in controls and auditability.

Controls, limits and audit trails

Sunrate lists procurement, business travel, marketing expenditure and supplier payments as use cases. Businesses can generate virtual cards for specific transactions or workflows, set spending limits and define validity periods based on approved policies. Cards can expire automatically once the intended task is complete.

Controls can be set across several dimensions:

• merchant category
• transaction amount
• currency
• geography
• validity period

Each action is recorded and auditable, according to the company, so businesses can see how payment instructions are created, authorised and executed. Sunrate says human oversight remains in place for critical financial decisions.

Online travel as an early use case

Sunrate points to the online travel agency (OTA) industry as one of the early use cases. Such businesses manage marketing spend and supplier payments across multiple teams, markets and channels, which can lead to fragmented spending, policy compliance problems and weaker budget control.

In Sunrate's example, an OTA could issue a virtual card for a single marketing campaign or supplier payment and set the spending permissions in advance. During a transaction, AI can monitor spending against predefined rules and risk thresholds. It can flag or block exceptions, approve transactions that meet policy, or escalate higher-risk transactions for human review. The company says this can reduce manual intervention while preserving oversight of distributed spending.

Part of the Sunrate.AI effort

The card builds on Sunrate.AI, the company's initiative to bring intelligent agents into payment and treasury workflows. It currently comprises five agents:

• Payment Agent: supports payment execution and reconciliation
• FX Agent: manages foreign exchange operations and conversion optimisation
• Compliance Agent: supports compliance pre-screening
• Onboarding Agent: streamlines business onboarding and account access
• Chat Agent: provides a natural-language interface and coordinates tasks across other agents

Sunrate also cites a white paper produced with Mastercard, "Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments", released jointly at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July. It examines how AI is evolving in business payments and identifies practical applications across the payment lifecycle.

What it means for businesses

Li Yilong, Head of AI at Sunrate, said: "The next stage of agentic payments is not simply about allowing AI to make recommendations. It is about giving agents the ability to execute financial tasks within clear boundaries, with the right controls, identity and accountability in place."

For companies, the pitch is that AI agents can act on approved instructions through a payment instrument with limits and logs attached, rather than only recommending actions. Sunrate says it will keep expanding its agentic payment capabilities across more business and treasury use cases. The release gives no pricing or availability details.

Sunrate was founded in 2016 and says it operates in 190+ countries and regions. It describes itself as a principal member of Mastercard and Visa.