Visa Debuts Agentic Program to Help Banks Test AI Payments

Visa has launched Visa Agentic Ready, a program that gives banks a structured way to test payments made by AI agents on behalf of consumers. Announced in a Tuesday (March 17) news release, the program is launching first in Europe and has enrolled 21 named issuing partners in its first phase, including Barclays, HSBC UK, Banco Santander, Revolut, Commerzbank, Nationwide Building Society, Nexi Group, Raiffeisen Bank International and DZ Bank.

AI agents are software programs that can search, evaluate and purchase on a consumer’s behalf without the consumer approving each step individually. As more companies build agent-based shopping tools, banks face a practical question: how to handle those transactions securely within existing payment systems. Visa Agentic Ready is designed to give issuers direct experience with that problem in controlled conditions before they encounter it at scale.

In the first phase, participating banks run agent-initiated transactions in production-grade testing environments alongside selected merchants. The work is intended to help issuers understand how these payments behave in live systems, develop internal policies and build familiarity with the underlying technology.

“As AI agents increasingly shape how people shop and buy, payments need to keep up,” Mathieu Altwegg, head of Product and Solutions at Visa Europe, said in the release. “Visa Agentic Ready will initially help European issuers prepare for secure, scalable agent-initiated payments, built on infrastructure people already trust.”

How the Transactions Work

Visa is applying existing payment security tools to agent-initiated transactions rather than building new infrastructure. Two technologies underpin the approach.

The first is tokenization, which substitutes a consumer’s card number with a unique digital code. When an AI agent initiates a purchase, it uses that code rather than the actual account details, so sensitive financial information is not passed through the agent. The second is biometric authentication, such as a fingerprint or face scan, which links the token to a verified account holder. Visa also applies risk scoring and configurable spending controls, allowing issuers to set limits on what an agent can spend and under what conditions. The consumer sets those parameters in advance.

The program has already produced an end-to-end transaction. Banco Santander used a Visa credential issued in Spain to enable an AI agent to purchase a book from a merchant, completing the full sequence of authorization, tokenized payment and network settlement without manual input from the consumer.

Matías Sánchez, global head of cards and digital solutions at Banco Santander, said the test demonstrated how agent-initiated payments can operate within existing financial infrastructure. “This is a major step in making AI-assisted shopping practical,” he said in the announcement. “By testing a live transaction, we demonstrated how these technologies enable secure, interoperable agentic commerce across banks, networks and merchants, while preserving consumer protections and controls.”

Visa said the program will expand to other markets, following earlier work with partners in North America, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America. Additional European partners are expected to join as the program develops.

Credentials, Not Storefronts, as the Center of Commerce

Visa’s program lands at a moment when the question of who wins in agentic commerce is still open. PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster has argued that when artificial intelligence agents handle shopping on a consumer’s behalf, the merchant storefront becomes a secondary concern. The agent, not the consumer, decides where to look and what to buy. That shifts the commercial relationship away from retailers competing on presentation and experience, and toward whoever holds the payment credential the agent is authorized to use.

In that model, the token is the transaction. The network that issued the credential, authenticated the agent and settled the payment captures value from the interaction regardless of where the product was discovered or which interface the agent used to reach the merchant.

Webster has also written about the competing protocols now vying to control how agent-initiated transactions are routed, with different approaches placing control at the merchant checkout layer or the product discovery layer. The network’s authentication, token and settlement infrastructure remain part of the transaction chain regardless of which protocol an agent uses to reach a merchant or which platform initiated the shopping task.