During the 2026 Hong Kong Fintech Week, global payment and treasury management platform Sunrate introduced its programmable multi-currency virtual payment card, the Sunrate Agentic Card, to corporate clients for the first time, and jointly released the world's first B2B industry AI agent payment white paper, "Beyond Automation: Defining Agent-Driven Global Payments," with Mastercard. The card is primarily designed to be invoked by AI agents, has already obtained Mastercard AgentPay certification, and is being put into practical use in high-frequency cross-border payment scenarios such as OTA.
The white paper proposes that cross-border payments are moving from "digitalization and datafication" toward an "autonomous" stage, in which AI agents with reasoning and planning capabilities autonomously orchestrate end-to-end corporate payment and treasury operations within an authorized framework. Research shows that 85% of companies globally plan to use AI agents, and 33% of industrial B2B companies have already tried using AI procurement agents to assist decision-making. The white paper also identifies 16 key pain points across the full B2B payment lifecycle that can be systematically addressed by AI, and provides 13 actionable use cases, covering supplier sourcing, accounts receivable and payable automation, dynamic payment routing, exchange rate monitoring, automated reconciliation, and anti-money laundering screening.
As a co-publisher of the white paper, Sunrate simultaneously launched the Sunrate.AI matrix, which includes five agents: Chat Agent, Onboarding Agent, Compliance Agent, Payment Agent, and FX Agent, covering the complete process of corporate cross-border payments from account opening and consultation to collections and payments, currency exchange, and compliance management. The white paper argues that "agentic global payments" have five major characteristics: human-controlled autonomy, intelligent hub, global connectivity, agile compliance, and near-zero friction. Juniper predicts that the annual growth rate of B2B agentic payments will exceed that of B2C by more than 100 percentage points.
At the product level, the core design philosophy of the Sunrate Agentic Card is to open payment tools directly for invocation by existing AI agents in the market. Enterprises can generate virtual cards in real time for tasks such as procurement, travel, and supplier payments, customize spending limits, and set validity periods according to approved workflows, with cards automatically expiring after transactions are completed. Authorized agents can complete card creation, payment parameter configuration, payment initiation, and result inquiries, with merchant category, transaction amount limits, currency, geographic scope, and valid time periods all precisely defined, and identity and permissions fully traceable and auditable throughout the process.
In terms of practical scenarios, the OTA industry is currently advancing the fastest. To address issues such as fragmented marketing spending and supplier payments, and the relatively high risk of overspending and non-compliant transactions on OTA platforms, the Sunrate Agentic Card can issue virtual cards in real time for each marketing campaign and each supplier payment while setting payment permissions, with AI screening abnormal spending in real time at the moment of transaction and automatically blocking, approving, or escalating to manual review based on risk thresholds. Li Yilong, Chief Technology Officer of Sunrate AI, said that the next step will be to continue deepening the layout around AI agents, enabling agents to participate more deeply in corporate payments and treasury operations within an authorized framework, and to promote agentic payments to more real-world business scenarios.
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