Visa is advancing the integration of artificial intelligence into payments and is launching its «Visa Agentic Ready» programme in Europe. According to a statement released on Tuesday, the aim is to provide banks and merchant partners with a testing environment in which transactions triggered by AI agents can be trialled under near real-world conditions. The focus is on scalability, security and user control.

Among the first participating institutions is Swiss card provider Cornèrcard. «AI agents will increasingly change how people shop, including here in Switzerland,» says Santosh Ritter, Country Manager for Visa Switzerland & Liechtenstein. The programme allows partners to gain early experience with AI-driven transactions and to build trust in new forms of payment.

Cornèrcard also sees the initiative as a strategic step: «With this new Visa initiative, we reaffirm our ambition to drive innovation and continuously improve the payment experience for our cardholders,» explains CEO Alessandro Seralvo.

Focus on Security and Control

In its initial phase, «Agentic Ready« focuses on ensuring that AI-initiated payments function reliably and at scale. Visa is leveraging existing technologies such as tokenisation and biometric authentication. These are intended to ensure that each transaction can be clearly assigned to a real person and that control always remains with the user.

According to Visa, Europe already offers favourable conditions for this: modern authentication methods, passkeys and token-based systems are widely established in the market and form the technological foundation for the next stage of digital commerce.

Broad Support from European Banks

In addition to Cornèrcard, numerous other institutions are participating in the programme, including major European banks such as Barclays, Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Erste Group, HSBC UK, Raiffeisen Bank International, Revolut and Santander. Visa expects additional partners to join as the programme progresses.

Step towards Programmable Commerce

With «Agentic Ready», Visa is pursuing the vision of increasingly intelligent and programmable commerce. In the future, AI agents will act on behalf of consumers, taking into account their preferences, context and instructions, while control over transactions remains with the user.

The programme builds on previous initiatives in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America and marks a further step towards a global infrastructure for AI-driven payments.