Visa and BBVA Show AI Agents Can Pay on Card Rails

Spain-based global financial group BBVA has completed its first artificial intelligence agent-initiated transaction in collaboration with Visa.

The transaction was initiated by an AI agent on behalf of a cardholder, and the payment was carried out using real card credentials and the systems of an active merchant, BBVA said in a Thursday (July 2) press release.

Visa Intelligent Commerce enabled the transaction, using tokenization, real-time fraud monitoring and other technologies that support secure digital payments, and Visa Payment Passkey, a biometric authentication method for online payments, supported the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements mandated by the European Union, according to the release.

The transaction was carried out under the Visa Agentic Ready program, per the release.

Visa launched the program in Europe in March, saying it gives banks a structured way to test payments made by AI agents on behalf of consumers. The company said that in the first phase, participating banks run agent-initiated transactions in production-grade testing environments alongside selected merchants to understand how these payments behave in live systems, develop internal policies and build familiarity with the underlying technology.

“Working with Visa through the Agentic Ready programme allows us to participate in the next phase of commerce, where AI agents can initiate transactions on behalf of cardholders using an infrastructure that already delivers scale, security and control,” Roberto Pagán, head of consumer payments at BBVA Spain, said in the release.

Eduardo Prieto, country manager of Visa in Spain, said in the release: “By connecting issuers, merchants and AI systems through our network, we are enabling this next phase of commerce using the infrastructure and protections already in place.”

The fully autonomous AI shopping agent may still be emerging, but its building blocks are already visible, Michele Herron, senior vice president and head of North America Value-Added Services at Visa, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in May.

Herron expects personal assistants that can participate in commerce to take shape within the next three years, beginning with simple tasks such as reordering household items, booking routine travel or comparing subscription options and then gradually expanding into more complex purchasing decisions.