Visa and Barclays Expand Partnership With Agentic Commerce Focus

Visa and United Kingdom-based bank Barclays expanded their six-decade partnership.

The new agreement spans issuing and acquiring across Barclays’ retail, corporate, business, United States and private bank businesses, according to a Wednesday (Oct. 29) press release.

Visa will continue to support Barclays issued card credentials in the U.K., while also helping promote growth in U.S. retail issuing and expanding commercial issuing into new markets, the release said.

“This agreement represents the next chapter in our long and successful partnership with Visa,” Barclays U.K. CEO Vim Maru said in the release. “Together we are investing in the future of payments and making it easier, faster and more secure for people and businesses to pay and get paid, wherever they are in the world. From pioneering the U.K.’s first credit card to enabling new forms of digital and account-to-account payments, Barclays and Visa have both maintained a longtime focus on the evolving ways that customers connect with their money.”

As part of the expansion, Barclays and Visa will look into new opportunities to innovate across a range of payment types, channels and technologies, per the release. Visa will give Barclays access to enhanced services supporting issuing and acquiring, while letting the bank use Visa’s value-added services (VAS).

The agreement is aimed at capitalizing on the potential of emerging payment customer experiences, like account-to-account payments and agentic commerce, the release said.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Prompt Economy: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration with Visa, examined how the rise of agentic artificial intelligence is reconfiguring the fundamentals of digital commerce.

“Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative anchors this transformation, connecting tokenized payments, authentication and spending controls to new agentic APIs that allow AI assistants to act safely on behalf of their users,” PYMNTS wrote Wednesday.

These technologies, built using Visa’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent Toolkit, mark the next stage of intelligent infrastructure in which bots don’t simply recommend products, but conduct transactions in real time.

The report also studied the way agentic AI “is transforming the customer journey from search to sale,” PYMNTS wrote. “As bots like Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky become digital concierges, merchants must make their data and policies readable by machines, not just people.”

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