Visa Intelligent Commerce

At the launch in San Francisco on 30 April 2025, Visa described AI-ready cards that replace card details with tokenized digital credentials and confirm that the chosen agent may act for the consumer. The consumer sets spending limits and conditions, Visa applies them as transaction controls, and commerce signals reach Visa in real time so that it can enforce those controls and help with disputes. Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe were named as the first partners of the program.

In its annual report for fiscal 2025, Visa describes the platform as a suite of APIs with tokenized payment credentials and authentication for agent-driven transactions. The same report states that a pilot processed live agentic token transactions in ecommerce and enterprise settings during 2025. When an agent sets up a new token for a person, Visa Payment Passkeys can confirm that the token carries that consent and belongs to the right device and identity. These agent tokens build on network tokenization, which replaces the card number with a token in mobile wallets and stored card files.

Merchants block automated traffic to stop fraud and scraping, and such filters would also block a shopping agent sent by a customer. The Trusted Agent Protocol, which Visa introduced on 14 October 2025 with Cloudflare, lets a registered agent sign its web requests so that the merchant can tell it from a malicious bot. Visa keeps the registered agents in its Agent Directory, and in December 2025 Visa named Akamai as the latest supporter of the protocol.

On 8 April 2026 Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration on the Visa Acceptance Platform that works with any network, protocol or token vault. Merchants can accept payments that agents start through the Trusted Agent Protocol, the Machine Payments Protocol, the Agentic Commerce Protocol or the Universal Commerce Protocol, with Visa cards and with cards of other networks. Visa runs the pilot with Aldar, AWS, Diddo, Highnote, Mesh, Payabli and Sumvin and plans to add more partners during 2026.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard through which AI models call external tools and data sources. The Visa MCP Server lets developers reach the Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs over this protocol, and Visa plans to extend it to more of its API portfolio. The Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit runs on top of the server, is available as a pilot and lets developers and business users instruct agents in plain language.

In the annual report for fiscal 2025, Visa lists the MCP server in the access layer of its Visa as a Service stack, next to on-demand APIs and fully managed solutions. The report describes the server as the connection between AI systems and the payment network infrastructure of Visa.

By 18 December 2025, Visa and its partners had completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions, and Visa counted more than 100 partners around the world. Pilots in the United States ran with Skyfire, Nekuda, PayOS and Ramp, while pilots in Asia Pacific and Europe were planned for early 2026. In the United Arab Emirates, Visa worked with the real estate company Aldar on agent payments for recurring fees.

On 10 June 2026 Visa announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI as part of Visa Intelligent Commerce. Visa payments are to be built into OpenAI experiences, with tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring within the limits and approvals that the user sets.

Europe, including the United Kingdom, was the first region of Visa Agentic Ready, a program that Visa launched on 17 March 2026 so that card issuers can test agent-initiated payments in their own systems with selected merchants. The first issuers included Barclays, Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Erste Bank Oesterreich, HSBC UK, Nexi Group and Banco Santander, together with Revolut.

At the Visa Payments Forum in Paris on 2 July 2026, Visa reported live purchases by AI agents with more than 30 European issuers, among them comdirect, Commerzbank, Deutsche Kreditbank, ING, Klarna and S-Payment. The merchants included lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot, and they recognized the agents through the Trusted Agent Protocol and the Agent Directory. Every transaction was secured with Visa Payment Passkeys, which help issuers meet the European rules on strong customer authentication.

Visa Intelligent Commerce is the Visa portfolio for payments by AI agents, which builds payment credentials, controls, authentication and protections into automated buying. An agent pays with a token that the cardholder released, within limits that the cardholder set beforehand.

The agent works with a token in place of the card number, as Visa described for its AI-ready cards at the launch of the program. The token also confirms that the chosen agent may act for the cardholder, and a passkey ties it to the consent, device and identity of that person.

Visa Agentic Ready is a global program, launched first in Europe on 17 March 2026, in which card issuers test agent-initiated payments under real conditions. The first phase checks whether issuers are ready to process such payments, and Visa expects more partners to join as the program expands.

Developers connect through the Visa Developer Center, where access to Visa Intelligent Commerce is limited to authorized users with an approved project. The MCP server then lets an AI agent or a large language model call the Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs directly.

Among the German card issuers in the live purchases of July 2026 were comdirect, Commerzbank, Deutsche Kreditbank, ING and S-Payment. DZ Bank was one of the first issuers of the Agentic Ready program in March 2026. Visa describes the offering as still in rollout, so features and availability may change before the final release.