Visa launches agentic payments programme in Europe

Visa has introduced its ‘Agentic Ready’ programme in Europe, marking a structured effort to prepare the payments ecosystem for the emergence of agent-initiated transactions and AI-driven commerce.

Launched in London, the programme is part of Visa’s broader Intelligent Commerce strategy and will initially focus on enabling issuing banks to test how AI agents can securely initiate and complete payments on behalf of consumers. The initiative begins in Europe, including the UK, reflecting the region’s maturity in authentication technologies such as tokenisation and biometrics.

In its first phase, the programme centres on issuer readiness, providing participating banks with controlled, production-grade environments to validate agent-initiated payments alongside selected merchants. The objective is to assess how such transactions can operate at scale while maintaining the security, trust, and regulatory safeguards associated with traditional card payments.

Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product and Solutions at Visa Europe, said the initiative addresses the growing role of AI in shaping consumer purchasing behaviour. “As AI agents increasingly shape how people shop and buy, payments need to keep up,” he noted, adding that the programme is designed to help issuers build on existing infrastructure to support secure, scalable agent-driven transactions.

The programme is underpinned by Visa’s existing “trust layer”, which integrates tokenisation, identity verification, risk management, and user controls. This framework is being extended to test how agent-initiated payments can remain linked to verified users, incorporating consent mechanisms and biometric authentication to ensure accountability and transparency.

A broad group of European financial institutions has joined the initial phase, including Barclays, HSBC UK, Commerzbank, Revolut, and Santander, among others. These participants will collaborate with Visa and merchants to test real-world use cases, including live transaction scenarios involving AI-assisted purchases.

The move reflects a broader shift in the payments industry towards programmable and autonomous commerce models, where AI systems increasingly influence product discovery, decision-making, and transaction execution. As these capabilities evolve, payment networks are under pressure to adapt infrastructure to support machine-initiated interactions without compromising consumer protections.

By focusing on controlled experimentation and ecosystem-wide collaboration, Visa’s Agentic Ready programme aims to bridge the gap between conceptual AI commerce use cases and scalable deployment. The initiative also signals increasing competition among payment networks and financial institutions to define standards for agentic transactions, which are expected to play a growing role in digital commerce globally.