Visa Launches Intelligent Commerce Connect to Help Businesses Enter Agentic Commerce

Generative AI is moving beyond answering questions toward acting on a user’s behalf, including selecting goods and initiating payments. That shift raises new questions over consent, authentication, fraud controls and accountability. Visa and Bank of China (Hong Kong), or BOCHK, are testing agent-initiated commerce in a controlled Hong Kong environment to assess whether automated transactions can be executed securely.

The proof of concept is being conducted under the GenA.I. Sandbox++ initiative. BOCHK’s AI agent will connect with the BOC Pay+ ecosystem and merchant platforms, while Visa supplies the underlying secure payment infrastructure needed to automate transactions. The announcement did not disclose a test launch date, transaction value, number of participating merchants or timetable for a commercial rollout.

Generative AI is evolving from answering questions to shopping, subscribing to services and initiating transactions on users’ behalf. That shift exposes a gap in payment infrastructure built around human cardholders and conventional merchant checkouts. Visa and Mastercard are developing dedicated rails for AI agents, while stablecoin and cryptocurrency protocols are targeting micropayments, machine-to-machine settlement and the identity and authorization controls autonomous commerce requires.

The latest reported tally as of Aug. 6, 2026, put AI-agent payment volume at only about $136 million, underscoring how early the market remains. Visa and Mastercard are competing to control the gateway for automated transactions, while onchain providers are pitching programmable, low-cost stablecoin payments for small purchases. Both camps are seeking to solve a central constraint: enabling an AI agent to prove its identity and spending authority before money moves.

Small and medium-sized businesses often lack dedicated procurement teams, leaving owners to handle supplier searches, purchasing and payments manually. Visa and Lianlian DigiTech are applying agentic AI to that workflow through LoopXPay, an AI agent designed to act within predefined spending limits and approval rules. The test is significant because it demonstrates how companies could automate procurement while retaining visibility, transaction controls and human oversight.

Visa and Lianlian DigiTech said on July 24, 2026, that LoopXPay completed the first live B2B agentic transaction in Greater China. Acting for a small business, the agent sourced a product sample, identified the purchasing requirement, recommended and compared suppliers, placed the order and securely executed payment in one workflow. The companies did not disclose the transaction value. LoopXPay has also been registered in Visa’s Agentic Directory, which identifies verified AI agents.

Visa is expanding beyond its role as a credit and debit card transaction network into value-added merchant services, focusing on agentic AI, stablecoins and digital assets. The shift could determine whether Visa can reduce its reliance on card-processing fees as payment methods rapidly evolve, while generating revenue from fraud prevention, data analytics and new settlement tools.

Visa executives recently said the company is advancing agentic commerce, in which AI agents can independently search, shop and make payments. It is also using AI to detect and block payment fraud such as romance scams while developing stablecoin applications. Reports did not provide investment figures, a formal launch date or projected new revenue, and Visa has yet to disclose a specific timetable.

Alchemy has launched AgentCard, allowing AI agents to transact over Visa’s payment network without requiring a person to handle each transaction. The service uses payment tokens issued by Visa while retaining existing credit-card rewards, protections and credit limits, showing that agentic commerce is moving beyond automated shopping to actual payments.

The latest development gives AgentCard access to the Visa network. Each AI agent can be assigned a dedicated email address and phone number for merchant identity verification and transaction processing. Alchemy has not disclosed an exact launch date, partner card issuer, transaction amounts or credit limits, and has so far focused on outlining the service’s features.

AI agents are evolving from providing recommendations to searching, making decisions and paying on consumers’ behalf. The shift requires the payments industry to address authorization, identity verification, risk controls and consumer control. Building on Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa Agentic Ready allows issuers to test agentic transactions over existing card networks, moving the concept into controlled, real-world payment flows.

Visa launched the program in Europe on March 17, 2026, with 21 issuers participating, including Barclays, HSBC UK and Revolut. It expanded to Latin America and the Caribbean on April 29, followed by 10 Asia-Pacific markets with more than 50 partners on April 30. Taiwan’s initial group includes nine issuers, among them Cathay United Bank, CTBC Bank and E.SUN Bank. Visa did not disclose an investment amount.

Payment fraud has evolved from isolated offenses into an organized business with specialized roles and the ability to operate at scale, posing an ongoing threat to global payment networks such as Visa. Blocking suspicious transactions without wrongly declining legitimate payments is critical to consumer trust, merchant operations and financial institutions’ risk costs.

James Mirfin, Visa’s global head of risk and identity solutions, said the company is embedding artificial intelligence throughout the payment process to raise the cost of committing fraud and reduce false positives without adding friction to transactions. The latest report did not disclose a deployment date, investment amount or performance figures. For now, the focus remains on Visa’s broader fraud-prevention strategy.

Visa and Mastercard, whose businesses have long centered on card transactions and fees, are extending Agentic AI into corporate operations and payment back offices. Visa is targeting dispute handling, while Mastercard is serving small and medium-sized businesses that lack full management teams. The initiatives reflect the card networks' shift toward becoming technology service providers.

On March 10, 2026, Mastercard launched Virtual C-Suite, beginning with a virtual CFO that analyzes cash flow and risk. Visa and ServiceNow are advancing a dispute-management system that routes and prioritizes cases and organizes documents. Issuers write off an average of $3.3 million annually and spend more than 360 hours preparing for audits, while Mastercard estimates that each case costs $9.08–$10.32.

AI agents are moving beyond recommendations to make purchases, call APIs and buy computing resources, but existing checkout systems are still designed for humans. Stripe and payments blockchain Tempo therefore jointly developed the open Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, allowing agents to receive payment requirements, authorize payments and access services in a single request. Visa’s integration with existing card networks is significant because it brings machine micropayments into mainstream payment and risk-control systems.

Stripe and Tempo released the MPP specification on March 18, 2026, alongside the launch of Tempo’s mainnet. Visa released a card-based specification and SDK the same day and enabled them on the Visa Acceptance Platform, with support for tokenization, authentication and agent identity verification. Visa said on July 14 that MPP had settled about $25,000 across roughly 115,000 transactions in the weeks since its mid-March launch, averaging less than 1 cent per transaction.

Agentic commerce allows AI agents, with consumers’ authorization, to search for products, place orders and make payments. Visa and Banco Santander integrated Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) with existing payment infrastructure to test consent capture, data security and interoperability across merchants and payment networks. A Visa survey found that more than 70% of Latin American consumers already use AI during the shopping process, making transaction controls and consumer protection critical to scaling the technology.

Visa and Banco Santander announced on March 12, 2026, that they had completed Latin America’s first end-to-end AI agent payment pilots across five markets: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. An AI agent bought chocolate in Brazil and books in the other four countries, completing the payments within existing regulatory and authorization parameters. The companies did not disclose transaction values or the number of participants.