Visa Payments Forum in Paris: Agentic Commerce is Coming

Trust remains a central objective to Visa as it unveils its latest advances in AI technology.

The payments giant hosted media and payments leaders for its Payments Forum in Paris, where Visa announced key milestones.

Key highlights include new technology for the next generation of wealth, agentic commerce and improvements to fraud defence. 

The announcement was made at the Visa Payments Forum in Paris which convenes 2,000 leaders to facilitate a discussion about the next generation of payments.

VPF Paris

The day begins with an introduction by Visa President Oliver Jenkyn. 

He outlines a few key moments in Visa’s strategy, which he goes on to tell clients at the event. 

In the latest announcement to come out of the Visa Payments Forum, the trusted payments behemoth says that using its infrastructure, AI agents are now able to make secure transactions on behalf of customers. 

AI Agents are able to search, select and initiate purchases on merchant websites across Europe. The agents only work within the controls and parameters set by users. 

Consumers will answer prompts in order to tailor the products to their needs, and the transaction requires manual human authorisation before conducting transactions. 

Visa’s Intelligent Commerce is the supporting system for these transactions, as it aims to support secure agentic transactions at scale. 

Visa currently works with 30 European issuers to enable AI agents to make transactions on behalf of cardholders. Names such as lastminute.com Frasers, BrickDepot and Cleverbridge are included. 

An example using lastminute.com was presented at a roundtable hosted by Visa executives detailing trends and insights into Europe. 

Present was also Principal European Economist Adolfo Laurneti as the roundtable delved into Europe’s success among geopolitical factors affecting the economy. 

Albrecht Kiel, Group Country Manager at Visa, says that there is a high demand for an understanding of gen AI, as money is moving differently.

“We will continue to support competition, innovation and growth across the region for decades to come,” he says.

“That’s reflected in the €500m (US$570.66m) investment we announced recently that further demonstrates our long-term commitment for Europe.”

Visa Agentic Ready has been expanded to include merchants as the last piece of the puzzle for agentic transactions, demonstrating the brand’s commitment to AI in the commerce space. 

This is enabled through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Directory, which enables merchants to be able to recognise and work with verified agents across different environments and platforms.

The giant is working with other trusted names such as Cloudflare and Akamai to embed capabilities at scale on merchant websites. 

“We’re now seeing AI agents buy on behalf of people directly with independent merchants,” says 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.”

Authentication happens via Visa’s Payment Passkeys, which keeps the user fully in control of payments made via AI Agent by ensuring a securely authorised transaction that is directly linked to a verified user and their explicit instruction. 

These models are live, and the company says this will enable agentic commerce to scale across Europe. The model is also extended to B2B payments scenarios which hopes to bring more efficiency to the table.