Visa and banks across Europe reach the next phase of agentic commerce, unlocking secure access to merchants
AI agents are now completing purchases with participating merchants, enabled by Visa’s infrastructure for trusted and secure transactions.
At the Visa Payments Forum (VPF) in Paris, where Visa convenes 2,000 payment industry leaders to explore the future of payments, Visa today announced the execution of live agentic commerce transactions across Europe, with AI agents carrying out purchases at participating merchant websites on behalf of cardholders. These transactions are taking place in live environments, marking an advance beyond testing at controlled storefronts, with AI agents now transacting based on cardholder instructions directly with independent merchants.
In these transactions, AI agents browsed products, selected items and initiated purchases, acting within consumer-defined parameters. Visa connects banks, merchants and AI systems via its network to enable secure, authenticated agentic transactions in line with European regulatory requirements.
These transactions are enabled through Visa Intelligent Commerce – Visa’s portfolio of initiatives enabling secure, AI-driven commerce experiences at scale – and are explicitly authorised by the consumer, with AI agents operating within defined user controls and parameters.
Making agentic commerce work across the ecosystem
Visa has and continues to support the execution of live agentic commerce transactions in Europe, working with over 30 European issuers to enable AI agents to make purchases on behalf of cardholders, with participating merchants including lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot.
These transactions span multiple sectors including travel, retail and e-commerce, demonstrating how agentic commerce can begin to operate across different real‑world consumer use cases.
This milestone marks the next phase of Visa’s global Agentic Ready programme in Europe – bringing together the infrastructure, standards and partners needed to support the development of agentic commerce in the real world.
“We’re now seeing AI agents buy on behalf of people directly with independent merchants,” said Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product and Solutions at Visa Europe. “The next step is to scale this by bringing the whole ecosystem together – from standards and infrastructure to partners and enablers – with trust built in from the start. It’s the same approach we took to scale contactless, and it’s how this next wave of commerce will take shape.”
Alessandro Petazzi, CEO of lastminute.com said: „At lastminute.com, our role has always been to take responsibility for the full travel experience – not just inspire the trip, but deliver it. That means owning the complexity: flights, hotels, payments, real-time changes. We’re already a trusted point in that transaction chain, and as AI changes how people search and plan, that role only becomes more important. Visa’s work on authentication and trust is what makes it possible to pilot this seriously. Early days – but exactly the right thing to be testing, and we’re glad to be part of it.”
In Romania, Banca Transilvania, the first local bank that has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, completed its first AI agent-initiated payment on behalf of a customer as part of this pilot, at Brick Depot – Certified LEGO® Store. This milestone demonstrates how Visa’s infrastructure can support secure, authenticated agentic transactions in real-world conditions, helping prepare the local payments ecosystem for the next generation of consumer-controlled digital commerce experiences.
Unlocking merchant participation for the first time
Merchants’ participation was enabled through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) and Agent Directory – designed to help merchants to securely recognise and work with verified AI agents across different platforms and environments.
These capabilities provide a consistent, secure signal of agent identity, allowing merchants to distinguish trusted AI interactions from non‑verified traffic, while maintaining control over how agents access their sites, surface products, and complete transactions.
Rather than requiring new infrastructure, these signals can be integrated into existing risk, policy and user experience frameworks. TAP is designed to work alongside both existing and emerging commerce protocols, allowing merchants to adopt it in a way that fits their preferred platforms and underlying infrastructure without disruption.
Implementation is supported by infrastructure providers including Cloudflare and Akamai, helping embed these capabilities into the systems that underpin merchant websites at scale.
Securing agentic transactions and consumer control with Visa Payment Passkeys
For issuers, participation is enabled through Visa Payment Passkeys, which provide a trusted and compliant way to authenticate transactions initiated by AI agents on behalf of consumers. Each transaction is securely authorised and directly linked to a verified user and their explicit instruction, keeping the consumer fully in control of when and how payments are made.
All transactions completed in the Agentic Ready programme were secured using Visa Payment Passkeys, giving issuers and merchants confidence in how transactions are approved and processed and support compliance with European Strong Customer Authentication requirements.
By ensuring authentication of the cardholder and identification of the trusted AI agent, Visa provides a critical trust layer – supporting agent‑initiated transactions to complete securely and with full visibility and control.
Pioneering the next phase of digital commerce
By enabling trusted interactions between AI agents, merchant websites and issuing banks, Visa is helping address the key barriers to adoption – including how consumers can remain in control of transactions, how merchants trust and engage with agents, and how issuers can maintain full visibility and control.
With these elements now working in live environments, agentic commerce can begin to scale and expand across sectors and markets in Europe. This model is also being extended to support commercial and B2B payment scenarios, where the same principles of trusted, agent‑initiated transactions can unlock greater efficiency and productivity for businesses.
Visa Agentic Ready programme partners
The issuing banks who have completed live, agent‑executed transactions at participating merchants – authenticated using Visa Payment Passkeys in support of issuer’s compliance with Strong Customer Authentication requirements – include:
Abanca, Alpha Bank, Bankinter, Barclays, BBVA, CaixaBank, Ceska Sporitelna, comdirect, Commerzbank, Cornèrcard, Bank of Cyprus, Deutsche Kreditbank, HSBC UK, ING, Klarna, Lloyds Banking Group, mBank, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest, Nexi Group, Nordea Bank, OP Cooperative, Piraeus Bank, PKO Bank Polski, Revolut, S-Payment, Swisscard, Tatra banka, Banca Transilvania, Vanquis Bank, Viseca.
