INDUSTRY // FIN. TECH

In these transactions, AI agents browsed products, selected items and initiated purchases, acting within consumerdefined 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. 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 for Visa in 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.”

Merchants’ participation was enabled through Visa’ s Trusted Agent Protocol 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. �

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