Visa Launches AI Agent Payments in Europe, Polish Banks Among Partners

At the Visa Payments Forum in Paris, Visa announced on July 2 that together with more than thirty European banks it had completed the first real-world transactions in which an AI agent made a purchase entirely on its own, acting on a customer's behalf. It is the first such case on the continent carried out outside a controlled test environment, on live merchant websites.

What happened

The transactions took place under Visa's Agentic Ready program, launched earlier this year, and used Visa Intelligent Commerce technology. After receiving purchase criteria and a spending limit from the user, the AI agent independently browsed a store's offerings, added a product to the cart, and completed payment without human involvement at any stage of the transaction.

Merchants where successful transactions took place included lastminute.com, the Frasers Group retail chain, the Cleverbridge platform, and BrickDepot. Purchases spanned travel bookings, clothing, and other e-commerce categories, showing that the mechanism is not limited to a single industry.

How the transactions were secured

Every transaction initiated by an agent must be tied to a specific, verified cardholder through Visa Payment Passkeys, based on device biometrics. This satisfies EU strong customer authentication requirements, meaning that gaining control of the algorithm alone would not be enough to execute an unauthorized payment.

The second layer of protection is the Trusted Agent Protocol, together with a registry of trusted agents. It lets merchants distinguish a certified, safe bot acting on a customer's behalf from ordinary automated traffic, including potentially malicious bot spam. Each merchant decides for itself whether to allow AI agents onto its platform at all.

A Polish angle

Among the more than thirty participating institutions, alongside Barclays, BBVA, HSBC UK, and Deutsche Kreditbank, are four entities operating in the Polish market: mBank, PKO Bank Polski, ING, and Revolut. That means Polish customers of these banks could be among the first in Europe to actually use AI-driven shopping once the feature reaches full production.

Mathieu Altwegg of Visa Europe stressed that the company is now seeing the moment when AI agents buy directly from independent merchants on behalf of people, rather than only in simulated lab conditions. Alessandro Petazzi, CEO of lastminute.com, added that it was Visa's work on authentication and trust that allowed his company to seriously test such a scenario on live customer traffic.

What it means for the market

The rollout is a pilot for now, with Visa targeting a full, large-scale launch of the feature in the coming years. The first use cases are expected to be recurring purchases, such as subscription renewals, business travel bookings, or regular grocery shopping, situations where the customer sets clear criteria in advance and does not need to make a manual decision each time.

For banks and merchants, this means preparing infrastructure for traffic generated not by humans clicking in a browser but by software acting on their behalf. Visa says the mechanism will eventually extend to business and B2B transactions as well, where a trusted agent could automate company purchases while keeping full visibility of the operations for the finance department.

For Polish consumers, the biggest open question is when mBank, PKO Bank Polski, ING, or Revolut will actually make the feature available in their apps, rather than just in the pilot program. For now the banks are testing the infrastructure, so Visa has not given a specific commercial launch date for customers in Poland.

Sources: Visa and Banks Across Europe Reach the Next Phase of Agentic Commerce (visa.co.uk), Visa settles first merchant agentic payments in Europe (paymentexpert.com), Sztuczna inteligencja sama zrobi zakupy (imagazine.pl).