“There’s almost a reimagining of the internet going on right now,” Visa Senior Vice President and Global Head of Growth Rubail Birwadker told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. For the past 30 years, eCommerce has been about keeping bad bots out. The fraudsters, scrapers and hostile traffic. Now, the challenge is flipped. The bots showing up represent consumers and real intent to buy.
Visa’s answer is to give developers the connective tissue to work with these new agents instead of blocking them.
Opening the MCP Server
Visa announced Thursday (Sept. 4) it will open access to its production Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so developers can plug artificial intelligence (AI) agents directly into Visa Intelligent Commerce application programming interfaces (APIs). The company is also piloting an Acceptance Agent Toolkit that lets nontechnical teams generate invoices, create payment links and run analytics using plain prompts.
The goal is to compress the path from idea to functioning, payment-enabled agent while keeping every transaction tied to Visa’s security framework.
“If this works really well for just 5% or 10% of consumer experiences, that’s not the bar,” Birwadker said. “It needs to work for nearly all consumer experiences, the way Visa’s card experience works everywhere.”
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Why Developers Matter
Birwadker described the MCP server as a secure integration layer that standardizes how agents and large language models interact with Visa’s services. Starting with Visa Intelligent Commerce and extending across more APIs, it reduces weeks of custom development to hours, he said.
On top of that sits the Acceptance Agent Toolkit, which lets business teams trigger prebuilt workflows like invoices or ad hoc revenue summaries with plain commands inside chat.
“The goal is to extend the trust of the Visa brand into the future of agentic commerce,” Birwadker said. “An MCP layer removes friction for developers and drives standardization at scale.”
Visa has been testing MCP internally and with partners since the spring launch of Visa Intelligent Commerce. Now, the company wants to “extend the edges of our network to make it even easier for agents and other companies to build on.”
Birwadker expects access layers like MCP to become “a relatively important tool” because websites today or even developer docs “were not really designed with agents in mind.”
MCP lets developers “build once, reuse everywhere,” making agent behaviors portable across markets and use cases. He said that teams are already testing real checkout flows: how fast transactions complete, how multi-merchant purchases work, and how to keep legitimate agent traffic from being misclassified as bots.
“This all works,” Birwadker said. “We just need to work the kinks out,” given the abstraction and automation unique to agent-led buying.
Merchant On-Ramps
For merchants, the Acceptance Agent Toolkit provides on-ramps that do not require code. A simple command such as “Create an invoice for $100 for John Doe, due Friday” returns a secure payment link. Asking “Summarize today’s revenue in New York State” retrieves permitted transaction data.
The aim is to give Visa Acceptance customers fast, practical wins on repetitive tasks that make agentic commerce real and scalable.
Birwadker sees three merchant camps forming as agentic AI’s relatively short life has already shifted from curiosity to the reality that this new channel is how their customers want to discover products and pay for them.
Some embrace it as a new channel for discovery and sales, eager to be found inside agent experiences. Established retailers are rethinking acquisition economics as agent channels capture more traffic and traditional strategies are no longer effective. A cautious group focuses on protecting margins and controlling fraud.
Despite their differences, Birwadker said, “the consensus is that agentic commerce is not a trend … it’s a new paradigm.”
Even right away. Several large retailers are already exploring pilots during the holiday peak. “Yes, a number of large retailers are,” Birwadker confirmed. “We’re working through it.”
Building Trust
Webster noted that trust will become the gating factor of agentic success for merchants, issuers and consumers. And building it is dependent on one factor alone.
Birwadker agreed, saying it starts with identity: anchoring agents to authenticated credentials through a consumer’s bank. Layering in enriched data payloads before, during and after each transaction ensures disputes can be resolved fairly. If an agent buys a blue bag instead of a black one, standardized data must show what happened so liability can be assigned between issuers and merchants.
“Identity followed by the right data payloads with the right authentication is the way to do this at scale,” he said, pointing to Visa’s broader work tokenizing credentials.
A Standardized Future
The path forward will not be seamless. Developers and merchants must adapt infrastructure built for human browsing to a world where agents shop and transact. That is why Visa is putting MCP in developers’ hands and a no-code toolkit in merchants’ hands, to standardize the connective layer and accelerate real-world learning.
For Birwadker, the endgame is ubiquity. A technology that only works in a handful of scenarios will not move the needle. Agentic commerce must be as seamless and trusted as swiping a Visa card is today. The company intends to iterate quickly, he said, until the trust quotient, usability and standardization is built.
“The easier it is for developers and merchants to build on MCP, the more likely it becomes the default,” he said. “Our bar isn’t niche adoption. It’s ubiquity.”
PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech, and real-time payments firms. She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce, and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.
Rubail Birwadker has been Visa’s senior vice president and global head of growth since November. He leads numerous growth functions, including global partnerships and AI and agentic commerce products.
