Visa has announced the launch of Agentic Ready, its new global program designed to support the payments ecosystem in its preparation for a new era of agentic commerce. The program will initially launch in Europe, including the United Kingdom, and relies on Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa’s strategic framework to drive trusted, AI-powered and scalable commerce experiences.
In a first phase, Visa Agentic Ready will focus on preparing issuers, offering participating entities a structured framework to test and validate transactions initiated by AI agents. To do this, it will work closely with Visa and selected merchants to analyze how these operations can be carried out securely, at scale and in controlled production environments.
Through the program, participating issuers will gain first-hand experience on how AI agent-based purchasing platforms can securely initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers, while maintaining the trust, control and assurances that characterize the Visa network.
“As AI agents increasingly influence the way people search, choose and buy, payments must also evolve,” says Eduardo Prieto, general director of Visa in Spain. “Visa Agentic Ready will initially help issuers prepare for secure, scalable, agent-initiated payments on an infrastructure that consumers already trust.”
A design adapted to Europe
Although Visa Agentic Ready is a global program, its first launch will take place in Europe, including the United Kingdom, within a gradual phased rollout. Europe has favorable conditions for testing and collaboration, with a high implementation of technologies such as tokenization, passkeys and advanced authentication; capabilities that are also part of Visa’s global infrastructure.
In this first stage, the focus is on testing how payments initiated by AI agents work in real issuer environments, to ensure they are secure, reliable and viable at scale.
Visa Agentic Ready builds on Visa’s trust layer, which combines tokens, identity, risk management and governance mechanisms to evaluate how trusted agent-initiated payments can be enabled across different channels and use cases. This work is helping to define how issuers can translate familiar protections into future AI-powered experiences, using tokenization and biometric authentication, so that every payment initiated by an agent is clearly linked to a real person, with their consent and under their control at key moments.
From preparation to full-scale deployment
Bringing agentic commerce to scale requires coordination across the entire payments ecosystem, and Visa has already onboarded several of its customers to the Agentic Ready program.
Through controlled testing in real-world settings with select merchants, the program allows participants to validate how agent-initiated payments work in real purchasing situations. The goal is to build confidence in these new experiences as they move from the conceptual phase to practical application.
This initiative is part of Visa’s broader vision for intelligent, programmable commerce, where secure payment credentials and network capabilities enable transactions to respond securely and flexibly to consumer intent, purchase context, and user-defined controls.
Bringing agentic commerce to scale requires coordination of the entire payments ecosystem
As more of the purchasing process becomes automated, this helps ensure that agents can act seamlessly on the consumer’s behalf, while keeping consumers in complete control.
Among the first issuing partners participating in the Visa Agentic Ready program are Alpha Bank, Banca Transilvania, Bank Leumi, Bank of Cyprus, Bank of Valletta, Barclays, CAL, Commerzbank, Cornèrcard, DZ Bank, Erste Bank Oesterreich as part of Erste Group, Eurobank Limited, HSBC UK, MAX, Millennium BCP, Nationwide Building Society, Nexi Group, Piraeus Bank, Raiffeisen Bank International, Revolut and Banco Santander, with additional partners expected to join as the program expands.
Visa’s Agentic Ready builds on momentum already achieved with partners in North America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America, with the goal of making AI-powered commerce a reality for people and businesses around the world.
