Agentic Ready, which lets banks and payment partners test agent-controlled payments, is being rolled out to Visa clients in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, the company announced in a news release Wednesday (April 29).
“As the next generation of commerce takes shape, AI agents are moving beyond answering questions to taking action—searching, deciding, and ultimately paying on behalf of consumers and businesses,” Visa said in the release.
“This shift has meaningful implications for the global payments ecosystem, from how transactions are authorized to how trust, security, and control are maintained at scale.”
Visa Agentic Ready lets banks and payment partners test agent‑initiated payments in “controlled, real‑world environments” using live cards and actual merchants.
It also lets them assess security, trust and control mechanisms as AI agents act on behalf of consumers and businesses and spot operational and readiness gaps before a wider deployment of agent-led transactions.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
“Across markets, we’re seeing growing interest in how AI agents could reshape commerce,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa senior vice president for growth products and partnerships.
“Visa Agentic Ready provides banks and issuing partners with a structured path to testing agent-initiated payments, learning what works, and ensuring global readiness as these experiences reach scale.”
Visa introduced Agentic Ready last month to partners in Europe and the U.K. The expansion will include more than 85 additional organizations, with plans to bring the program to even more markets later in the year.
The expansion comes on the heels of Visa’s latest earnings call, in which CEO Ryan McInerney and other executives discussed the company’s agentic commerce push. They described a near-term environment in which software agents initiate and carry out transactions, often in small increments and with little human involvement.
“Tokenization, credential management and fraud controls are expected to underpin these new transaction flows, particularly as agents require trusted payment methods,” PYMNTS wrote.
“McInerney noted that agents are likely to fragment purchases into multiple transactions, while also creating entirely new categories of microtransactions.”
In other agentic commerce news, new PYMNTS Intelligence and Trulioo research finds that more than 90% of organizations now say that managing bot traffic is a challenge.
“After all, digital security and authentication infrastructure has rested on a simple premise: that people interact with systems, and systems respond,” PYMNTS wrote Wednesday. “Identity frameworks, fraud models and authentication layers were all built to answer a single question of whether there was the right human on the other side.”
