Visa, a global leader in digital payments, announced the launch of Visa Agentic Ready, a new global programme designed to support the payments ecosystem as it prepares for a new era of agentic commerce. Launching first in Europe, including the UK, this builds on Visa Intelligent Commerce - Visa’s strategic framework for enabling trusted, AI-driven commerce experiences at scale.

In its first phase, Visa Agentic Ready focuses on issuer readiness, providing issuing partners with a structured pathway to test and validate agent-initiated transactions, working in close partnership with Visa and selected merchants to explore how these transactions could operate securely, at scale, in controlled production environments.

Through the programme, participating issuers will gain firsthand experience of how agentic commerce platforms can securely initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers, while maintaining the trust, control and protections that underpin the Visa network.

“As AI agents increasingly shape how people shop and buy, payments need to keep up,” said Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product & Solutions, Visa Europe. “Visa Agentic Ready will initially help European issuers prepare for secure, scalable agent‑initiated payments, built on infrastructure people already trust.”

While Visa Agentic Ready is a global programme, it is launching first in Europe, including the UK, as part of a phased rollout. Europe offers a strong environment for testing and collaboration, with high adoption of tokenisation, passkeys and advanced authentication capabilities that are also well established across Visa’s global network.

This initial phase focuses on testing how agent-initiated payments work in real issuer environments, helping ensure they remain secure, reliable and easy to run at scale.

Visa Agentic Ready is powered by Visa’s trust layer, bringing together tokens, identity, risk and controls to examine how trusted agent‑initiated payments could be enabled across channels and use cases. The work is helping to inform how issuers can extend familiar protections into future AI‑driven experiences, using tokenisation and biometric authentication so that agent‑initiated payments are clearly tied to a real person, with consent and control at key moments.