In Singapore, more than 3 in 4 consumers are already using artificial intelligence to help them shop. They research products, compare options and navigate the sprawl of digital commerce through large language models that have become a routine part of daily life. What they have not done yet is hand those AI systems their wallets.
That gap, between AI-guided decisions and AI-executed transactions, is the fault line running through Visa’s Asia Pacific strategy. And according to Stephen Karpin, the company’s Asia Pacific president, the region that bridges it first will not just win a market. It will write the playbook for the rest of the world.
In a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Karpin laid out the infrastructure already in place, the trust barrier still standing in the way, and why he believes the next chapter of global commerce will be authored here.
A Mobile-Native Commercial Environment
The foundation, Karpin argued, is already there. Seventy-three percent of online transactions across the region are conducted on mobile devices. Eighty percent of product discovery happens through mobile-first channels. Super apps, QR payments and real-time rails have produced a consumer base that moves fluidly between payments, shopping, messaging and financial management. Often within a single interface.
Karpin was direct about where that leaves the region on the agentic frontier.
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“The infrastructure is strong, with connected devices and there’s a lot of tokenization out there, which is a very important precondition,” he said. “There’s no scaled agentic payment,” he acknowledged. “But the pilots are happening.”
In other words: the runway is built. The question is whether trust will let the plane take off.
Trust as the Load-Bearing Structure
But infrastructure and readiness are not the same as adoption. And here, Karpin introduced the variable that no amount of tokenization can solve on its own.
“Trust is fundamental as it’s always been in commerce. And when you’re moving money, it is critical,” he said.
That observation carries particular weight in the agentic payments context, where consumers may authorize software agents to initiate transactions on their behalf. Even as generative AI has already moved rapidly into search, product recommendation and customer engagement.
The Singapore data makes the point precisely: over 75% of consumers there are already using LLMs in their commerce experience, yet as Karpin noted, “it hasn’t moved to payments yet.” The reason is not technical.
“The trust element is the main factor that is having people have their reservations, as it should be,” he said. Browsing with an AI is one thing. Letting it spend is another.
Payments, unlike browsing or discovery, involve direct financial exposure. For institutions designing agentic frameworks, the challenge is earning it.
Interoperability Moves to the Forefront
Mobile adoption explains readiness, and a cohesive ecosystem is essential.
“Interoperability is central,” Karpin said, describing cross-network connectivity as one of Visa’s core responsibilities. Innovation often occurs domestically, shaped by local regulation, consumer preferences and infrastructure investment. Scale, however, requires cross-border continuity.
Karpin framed Visa’s role as a connective one. Partnerships with domestic networks, wallets and financial institutions allow payment credentials to function consistently across markets. He described this approach as a “network of networks strategy,” enabling stored-value wallets and QR ecosystems to extend beyond domestic limitations.
In practical terms, this reduces fragmentation, and fragmentation erodes trust. For merchants, broader connectivity expands acceptance pathways. For consumers, it preserves the familiarity of their preferred wallets and rails while extending their reach across borders.
Interoperability is not just plumbing. Karpin described it as the precondition for the next leap: what he called the age of “intelligent commerce,” enabled by “intelligent payments.” The phrase signals a structural shift in how transactions are constructed. Traditional payment flows largely treat intelligence as an adjunct, layered through marketing engines, loyalty programs or post-transaction analytics. Intelligent commerce embeds decision logic directly into the payment experience.
Flexible Credentials and Decision Intelligence
If interoperability is the infrastructure of trust, Visa’s Flex Credential is where that trust meets the transaction. Initially designed to let consumers choose dynamically among funding sources — points, credit, debit, BNPL — its significance becomes exponentially larger when the entity making that choice is an AI agent rather than a human.
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“If you think about an agent being equipped with multiple sources of funds,” he said, including points, buy now pay later, revolving credit, multicurrency accounts and potentially stablecoins, well, that’s a disruptive proposition.
Traditional payment instruments operate on static funding logic. A card is a card. Flexible credentials introduce dynamic selection, turning the payment moment into an exercise in real-time optimization. The question shifts from “which card do I use” to “which funding source produces the best outcome right now.”
Under agentic commerce, that decision migrates entirely from the consumer’s hands to systems operating in the background, systems that, if trusted, could optimize every transaction the consumer never has to think about again.
China as Both Market and Blueprint
The interoperability thesis is not theoretical. Visa’s activity in China, shaped by regulatory constraints distinct from every other APAC market, offers a live proof of concept.
The partnership with China UnionPay enables mainland consumers to move funds across borders while preserving domestic infrastructure linkages. It is not disruption, Karpin suggested. It is collaboration between networks that each bring something the other cannot replicate alone. That model, he indicated, is the template.
Self-Managed Payments and Expanding Roles
One further development signals how close the agentic future already is. Karpin pointed to the expanding universe of self-managed payments, individuals and small businesses operating simultaneously as payers and payees. Visa Accept, for example, now enables debit and prepaid cardholders to receive payments directly into their Visa accounts, collapsing the distinction between a consumer credential and a merchant one.
For gig workers, micro-merchants and platform participants, this is already the reality: a single credential that receives, spends and manages funds within one framework. The payment account has become operational infrastructure.
In the agentic environment Karpin described, those same accounts evolve into programmable hubs, not just holding funds, but executing financial instructions on behalf of the people and businesses they serve. The consumer becomes less a user of the payment system and more its beneficiary.
Pilots, Pathways and the Agentic Horizon
Karpin was careful not to overstate the timeline. Consumer-scale agentic payments remain emergent. The pilots are running, not scaling. The trust frameworks are under construction, not complete.
But he was unambiguous about the direction. “I do have full conviction that trusted agents will scale up,” he told Webster. “I think agents will be making payments at a very grand scale … the Asia Pacific region will lead the way, in many different measures, in the months and years to come.”
That confidence rests on something more durable than enthusiasm.
The mobile infrastructure exists. The tokenization layer is in place. The interoperability frameworks are being built. The credentials are becoming flexible. All that separates the region from the agentic commerce Karpin described is the one thing that has always separated promise from payment: trust.
And trust, as he noted, is not a technology problem. It is a track record problem. Asia Pacific, he suggested, is building one.
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