Latest news with #VisaIntelligentCommerce
Finextra
3 days ago
- Business
- Finextra
Visa makes AI-driven commerce push in Asia Pacific
The future of commerce in Asia Pacific is on display at the Visa Asia Pacific Media Showcase, where the company announced a suite of product innovations and strategic partnerships to enable a new era of commerce for the region. 0 This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author. Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer said, 'Combining the strength of our global network with our leadership in payment innovation here in Asia Pacific, we are bringing new products and solutions that will transform commerce and deliver trust and security to AI-enabled payments across the region.' The Visa Asia Pacific media showcase highlighted how AI-enabled digital commerce will significantly change the way consumers across the region discover and purchase products and services. In the near future, AI agents will browse, select, purchase, and manage transactions on behalf of users, making trust in payments more important than ever. Visa's new AI-enabled solutions offer regional partners including AI platforms, fintechs, banks, and merchants a seamless way to connect to the Visa network to deliver secure, frictionless payment experiences. Headlining today's announcement, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce, a new initiative that opens Visa's payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of AI-powered commerce in Asia Pacific. Visa Intelligent Commerce: A New Era for Asia Pacific Visa Intelligent Commerce brings a suite of integrated APIs and a commercial partner program to AI platforms, enabling developers to deploy Visa's AI commerce capabilities securely and at scale. Visa announced today that it is in explorations with Ant International, Grab and Tencent to grow AI commerce by enabling a secure and seamless checkout experience. Ant International is a leading global digital payment, digitisation, and financial technology provider. Grab is Southeast Asia's leading super app offering ride-hailing, food delivery, digital payments, and financial services across eight markets. Tencent is a multinational technology leader that develops a wide range of digital products and services, including Weixin/WeChat, China's super app. Over the past 25 years, Visa's global network has handled 3.3 trillion transactions. Today, Visa is advancing its infrastructure, standards, and capabilities to power AI-driven commerce, opening new opportunities for consumers across Asia Pacific. Soon, AI agents integrated into familiar platforms will be able to transact using Visa's 4.8 billion credentials at millions of merchant locations worldwide. T.R. Ramachandran, Head of Products and Solutions, Asia Pacific, Visa, said, 'As global commerce continues to evolve rapidly, Visa remains at the forefront of delivering innovations that will enable the future of commerce across Asia Pacific.' 'We believe AI agents will play a growing role in commerce, from handling routine purchases such as ordering food, to more complex purchases such as securing event tickets or making travel reservations,' added Ramachandran. 'By combining AI capabilities with Visa's trusted payment infrastructure, we are enabling a seamless, secure, and more enjoyable experience for consumers, merchants, and businesses alike.' New Products and Capabilities for Asia Pacific Visa continues to expand its product portfolio with solutions designed to support the evolving payment needs of consumers and businesses across Asia Pacific. Stablecoins: Visa has been facilitating cryptocurrency transactions for over five years and is now expanding its offering to include stablecoin backed cards, settlement, and programmable money. On and off-ramps via stablecoin-backed cards allow consumers to use their Visa credentials to buy stablecoins with fiat currency and pay with stablecoin across Visa-accepting merchant locations. In Asia Pacific, Visa is partnering with DCS Singapore, DTC Pay and StraitsX on stablecoin-backed cards that support conversion through regulated infrastructure. Enabling seven-day-a-week settlement for stablecoins: Visa has settled more than $225 million to date in stablecoin volume that has been settled through Visa across participating clients. In Asia Pacific, Visa is working with StraitsX for stablecoin settlement. Through the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), Visa provides a platform for our partners to issue and manage fiat-backed tokens, offering interconnectivity to public and private blockchains, enabling programmable financing, trading of tokenized assets and facilitating cross-border money movement. Visa is looking to expand the availability of VTAP to more partners later this year and into 2026. Flex Credential: Visa's Flex Credential, a next-generation card that allows users to toggle between debit, credit, and reward points, continues to gain traction in Asia Pacific. Visa first launched Flex in partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) and Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company (SMCC), known as Olive, two years ago in Japan. Today, more than 5 million Olive account holders are benefitting from the Visa Flex Credential. The Olive card continues to outperform, with cardholder transactions averaging 40% higher than the national average in Japan over the past year. Visa and SMCC have expanded the Visa Flex Credential to support small businesses with the flexibility to switch between business and personal accounts using the same Olive card, enhancing access to credit and cash flow management. Visa is also collaborating with local banks in Vietnam to launch Flex Credential in the next few months. New Strategic Partnerships to Enable More Ways to Pay and Get Paid Visa is launching new services and partnerships to make it easier for consumers, merchants, and businesses in Asia Pacific to pay and get paid. Visa Pay: A service designed to connect any participating wallet to any Visa-accepting merchant, local or international, in-store or online, launches across Asia Pacific, home to the largest number of digital wallet users. Through partnerships with leading players including LINE Pay in Taiwan, Maya in the Philippines, OpenRice in Hong Kong, and Woori Card in South Korea, Visa is expanding access to its global network, giving consumers more ways to pay globally by tapping, scanning or online. Digital Identity: This suite of solutions includes Passkeys, Tap to Confirm, and enhanced data which are meant to identify and authenticate digital users. These solutions will reduce friction for consumers by being digitally native while improving payment security and authorisation rates with enhanced transaction data and state-of-the-art fraud prevention techniques. New partners in the region include Coles, a supermarket chain in Australia and Maybank, a leading financial services provider in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Visa Accept is a new solution that allows micro-sellers to receive payments directly to their eligible Visa debit card using any NFC-enabled smartphone. Launching in Vietnam, the service supports micro-entrepreneurs and informal sellers such as street vendors, freelancers, and rural service providers. Participating issuers will enable cardholders to accept contactless payments through their bank's mobile app.
CNET
13-05-2025
- Business
- CNET
Do You Trust AI to Shop for You? Credit Card Companies Are Betting You Do
Getty Images/CNET AI will soon be able to make purchases based on preferences it learns about you. You just need to hand over your credit card. Visa and Mastercard both announced last week that their cardholders will be able to use artificial intelligence to automate credit card purchases for groceries, travel and everything else. Visa confirmed to CNET that testing for its new Visa Intelligent Commerce program is underway in North America, with widespread usage expected next year. Mastercard's Agentic Payments Program, similar to Visa's offering, is currently available in the US. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf," Visa's chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, said in the press release. "These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well." However, trusting AI isn't always an easy ask. It's often made news since its introduction for misleading responses and "hallucinations," fabricating information or operating in unexpected ways. Asking it what toppings to add to your pizza is one thing, but giving AI your financial information could have serious consequences. What happens if an AI agent hallucinates and makes a purchase worth hundreds of dollars, or is fed a scam link to a phishing site? Additionally, it's unclear how shopping recommendations will be delivered and vetted by these services. AI recommendations can be helpful so long as they're accurate and don't have ulterior motives. ChatGPT also announced last month that it is adding shopping features to its ChatGPT Search. However, ChatGPT's product doesn't purchase the items for you. These AI agents could make it easier to find products, cutting down on the time you're researching and saving you a click or two, but you might not have the same confidence in the purchase if you did it yourself. What is AI-powered shopping? Visa's and Mastercard's new programs are designed to use AI to learn your buying habits and customize your shopping experience. But they take this a step further, allowing you to authorize AI to make purchases on your behalf. As an example, Mastercard said if you're planning a party, the AI agent will recommend supplies, outfits, venues and vendors based on your preferences and conversation, then ultimately make the purchases for you. It's unclear how the AI agent will determine the best product for you, or whether companies can pay to have their products promoted. Both programs are tokenized for security, which basically means your credit card information is replaced with a one-time-use key so the AI agent doesn't use your actual credit card info. It's similar to using a virtual card number. Visa and Mastercard said that you won't need a new credit card to take advantage of the new AI tools, and you can set up controls, such as spending limits and purchase restrictions. Both companies said their existing credit card fraud protections extend to the AI agents, along with any dispute resolution. Does anyone really need AI-powered shopping? While some implementations of generative AI are helpful and solve issues in everyday life, not all things need to be automated with AI. At least on the surface, the biggest benefits of these new AI agents are tailoring a custom shopping experience and cutting down on time spent researching and ultimately checking out. While those improvements could indeed be convenient, they could also make spending money even easier since you need less time to complete the purchase. The agent could also connect you with products that might not be what you'd normally purchase without its suggestion that could lead to credit card debt. Beyond learning your shopping preference, most of the other features are already available in some form. Bill payments and subscriptions can already be automated without the need for AI to purchase things on your behalf. You can already use generative AI like ChatGPT to help narrow down product offers if you so choose, or check Google reviews yourself to find the right fit. Your personal data, like how you shop, is also a hotter commodity than many people realize, and consent to use it shouldn't be given away lightly. Is it safe to use AI-powered shopping? While Visa and Mastercard fraud protections extend to these AI purchases, past issues raise the question of whether you should hand over your financial information to AI. It's one thing when an AI hallucinates extra fingers on a generated image or presents something as a historical fact that never happened. But you should be especially cautious when it comes to spending your money and sharing personal habits, at least for now. "Trusting these tools to make any financial decision for you, no matter how small, carries some risk that they won't do what you're expecting them to do," CNET senior AI editor Jon Reed said. "If you do decide to use these tools, make sure to keep a close eye on your financial accounts and transactions to spot anything unexpected before it becomes a bigger problem."
Business Insider
07-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The future is here: Visa announces new era of commerce featuring AI
Lagos, Nigeria – April 30, 2025 – The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations. 'As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,' said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. 'We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments.' Product Roadmap Visa kicked off its Global Product Drop by sharing how the combination of AI and digital commerce will mark a significant shift in the way consumers discover and buy products and services. In the near future, consumers will enable AI agents to browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. For this to be possible, agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well. Visa will bring this trust to AI commerce by providing a simple way for our partners – AI platforms, tech players, banks, fintechs, merchants and more – to access the Visa network. This is the next step in Visa's journey to connect even more buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments. Headlining the announcement, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce, a groundbreaking initiative that opens Visa's payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of true AI commerce. Visa also announced new stablecoin partnerships to reach more people and geographies. Finally, Visa shared the expansion of its Flex Credential platform, and new products and services that provide more ways for people to pay and get paid. The advancements introduced today will enable the next wave of commerce and money movement. Visa Intelligent Commerce: A New Era In the last 25 years, Visa's network has processed 3.3 trillion transactions. Visa will extend the infrastructure, standards and capabilities present in physical and digital commerce today to AI commerce. Soon consumers will enable AI agents via AI platforms to use a Visa credential (of which there are 4.8 billion today) at any accepting merchant location (currently totaling over 150 million) for any payment use case. 'Historically, Visa has used AI to protect consumers, harnessing it to help combat fraud. Now, we will also enable AI to empower consumers, fundamentally shifting digital commerce to make it more personal, more relevant and more delightful,' added McInerney. 'For any AI commerce use case to take hold, the payment is a critical enabler of success. If there is no payment, there is no commerce. That's the expertise and trust that Visa brings.' To move the needle on AI commerce at the speed and scale required, the company is collaborating with the AI platforms and brands that consumers and merchants are choosing to work with every day, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung. 'We see tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play in commerce, from streamlining 'regular' transaction-driven tasks such as ordering groceries, to more sophisticated search and decision-making like securing that hard-to-get restaurant reservation or concert ticket,' said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer. 'This will be a transformative change, bringing more magic and convenience to the consumer experience and creating a new world that will forever change how we shop and buy.' New Products, Advancements and Capabilities Visa continues to invest in new features and capabilities that help extend the reach of its network and provide secure and seamless payment experiences. Stablecoins: For over half a decade, Visa has been facilitating crypto transactions and is now further expanding the applications for stablecoins with stablecoin-linked cards, settlement and programmable money. Bridge, a Stripe company, is working with Visa on a new card product that enables fintech developers to offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration. Flex Credential Expansion: Last year, Visa reinvented the card with the introduction of the Flex Credential, a next generation card that can seamlessly toggle between different payment methods (debit, credit, buy now, pay later). Today, millions of people around the world are using the Flex Credential and Visa plans to roll out new use cases like expanding access to lines of credit, investment accounts, rewards, commercial cards and more. Unveiled today, Visa and Klarna are partnering to bring the Flex Credential to the U.S. and will be the first in Europe to offer a debit-to-buy now pay later use case that gives consumers more flexibility in how they pay. More details will be announced later this year. Introducing More Ways to Pay and Get Paid: Visa is also announcing more ways for consumers, merchants and partners to pay and get paid around the world. Visa Pay is a new service designed to connect any participating wallet to any Visa-accepting merchant, local or international, in-store or online. Visa Pay is set for beta release in select markets in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Visa Accept is a new offering to give micro-sellers a 'way to get paid' to their eligible Visa debit card, from any NFC-capable smartphone with just a few clicks, providing access to billions of credentials with just one card in your pocket. Visa Accept is being released for Visa beta partners in July, with the first activations in Latin America and Asia. About Visa Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at
Tahya Masr
06-05-2025
- Business
- Tahya Masr
Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI
The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations. 'As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,' said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. 'We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments.' Product Roadmap Visa kicked off its Global Product Drop by sharing how the combination of AI and digital commerce will mark a significant shift in the way consumers discover and buy products and services. In the near future, consumers will enable AI agents to browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. For this to be possible, agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well. Visa will bring this trust to AI commerce by providing a simple way for our partners – AI platforms, tech players, banks, fintechs, merchants and more – to access the Visa network. This is the next step in Visa's journey to connect even more buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments. Headlining the announcement, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce , a groundbreaking initiative that opens Visa's payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of true AI commerce. Visa also announced new stablecoin partnerships to reach more people and geographies. Finally, Visa shared the expansion of its Flex Credential platform, and new products and services that provide more ways for people to pay and get paid. The advancements introduced today will enable the next wave of commerce and money movement. Visa Intelligent Commerce: A New Era In the last 25 years, Visa's network has processed 3.3 trillion transactions. Visa will extend the infrastructure, standards and capabilities present in physical and digital commerce today to AI commerce. Soon consumers will enable AI agents via AI platforms to use a Visa credential (of which there are 4.8 billion today) at any accepting merchant location (currently totaling over 150 million) for any payment use case. 'Historically, Visa has used AI to protect consumers, harnessing it to help combat fraud. Now, we will also enable AI to empower consumers, fundamentally shifting digital commerce to make it more personal, more relevant and more delightful,' added McInerney. 'For any AI commerce use case to take hold, the payment is a critical enabler of success. If there is no payment, there is no commerce. That's the expertise and trust that Visa brings.' To move the needle on AI commerce at the speed and scale required, the company is collaborating with the AI platforms and brands that consumers and merchants are choosing to work with every day, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung. 'We see tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play in commerce, from streamlining 'regular' transaction-driven tasks such as ordering groceries, to more sophisticated search and decision-making like securing that hard-to-get restaurant reservation or concert ticket,' said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer. 'This will be a transformative change, bringing more magic and convenience to the consumer experience and creating a new world that will forever change how we shop and buy.' New Products, Advancements and Capabilities Visa continues to invest in new features and capabilities that help extend the reach of its network and provide secure and seamless payment experiences. Stablecoins: For over half a decade, Visa has been facilitating crypto transactions and is now further expanding the applications for stablecoins with stablecoin-linked cards, settlement and programmable money. Bridge, a Stripe company, is working with Visa on a new card product that enables fintech developers to offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration. Flex Credential Expansion: Last year, Visa reinvented the card with the introduction of the Flex Credential, a next generation card that can seamlessly toggle between different payment methods (debit, credit, buy now, pay later). Today, millions of people around the world are using the Flex Credential and Visa plans to roll out new use cases like expanding access to lines of credit, investment accounts, rewards, commercial cards and more. Unveiled today, Visa and Klarna are partnering to bring the Flex Credential to the U.S. and will be the first in Europe to offer a debit-to-buy now pay later use case that gives consumers more flexibility in how they pay. More details will be announced later this year. Introducing More Ways to Pay and Get Paid: Visa is also announcing more ways for consumers, merchants and partners to pay and get paid around the world. • Visa Pay is a new service designed to connect any participating wallet to any Visa-accepting merchant, local or international, in-store or online. Visa Pay is set for beta release in select markets in Asia, Europe and Latin America. • Visa Accept is a new offering to give micro-sellers a 'way to get paid' to their eligible Visa debit card, from any NFC-capable smartphone with just a few clicks, providing access to billions of credentials with just one card in your pocket. Visa Accept is being released for Visa beta partners in July, with the first activations in Latin America and Asia.
Forbes
05-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Mastercard And Visa Unleash AI Agents To Shop For You
Within days of each other, MasterCard and Visa announced AI Agent capabilities to their users ... More advancing agentic commerce. A new era of intelligent, autonomous shopping is quickly taking shape — and two of the world's biggest payments networks are leading the charge. Within days of each other, Mastercard and Visa both unveiled AI agent capabilities that allow intelligent software to make purchases on behalf of consumers. While Visa's move garnered headlines for enabling AI systems like ChatGPT to transact with stored credentials, Mastercard has gone a step further — building out what it calls Agent Pay, an AI-native payment infrastructure rooted in tokenization, trust and agentic commerce. 'Mastercard Agent Pay brings transparency and trust to the ecosystem,' shared Sherri Haymond, Co-President of Global Partnerships at Mastercard in an email response. 'As people grow increasingly comfortable with AI, Agent Pay addresses a genuine need by simplifying the purchasing process and providing personalized recommendations.' Unlike traditional digital wallets or voice assistants that facilitate transactions after user prompts, Agent Pay enables fully autonomous agents to identify, research, negotiate and pay for goods or services — based on user preferences and intent. The result is a seamless interaction where the AI not only suggests the best options but can also securely close the deal on your behalf. In this emerging 'agentic' economy, AI no longer just responds — it acts. That distinction matters. Mastercard defines agentic commerce as a new class of AI-powered capabilities that allow software agents to handle the entire end-to-end process of a purchase, from discovery to delivery. That evolution required not only a leap in AI design but also a fundamental rethinking of the online payments stack. 'Moving beyond traditional AI and generative AI, agentic AI executes tasks autonomously, understanding our intentions and making decisions in real time to achieve our goals,' Haymond explained. 'Agentic commerce is not just about enabling AI to transact — it's about building a new foundation of trust, security and interoperability across the entire payments ecosystem.' Visa's offering – dubbed Visa Intelligent Commerce – focuses on enabling AI models like ChatGPT to access Visa credentials via a 'delegated authorization' model. Mastercard, in contrast, is anchoring Agent Pay in a robust security framework built around agentic tokens — an evolution of its long-standing tokenization tech — to ensure each transaction by an AI agent is both secure and transparent. Mastercard's tokenization system, introduced a decade ago, replaces sensitive card credentials with secure, merchant-specific tokens. With Agent Pay, that approach is extended to allow trusted AI agents to transact without ever exposing real payment data — a critical feature in an environment without direct human oversight. 'We've enhanced this technology and built it for the age of AI,' Haymond explained. 'Mastercard agentic tokens allow AI agents to make secure and transparent purchases on behalf of users.' To further reinforce consumer trust, Mastercard requires AI agents to be registered and verified. Each purchase is logged and traceable, and consumers have the ability to set parameters for what an agent can — and cannot — do. The company is also applying its full suite of cybersecurity capabilities to monitor agent-led transactions for fraud, dispute resolution and abuse. The value proposition goes far beyond simply tying payments to personalized ads. According to Haymond, Agent Pay enables conversational AI platforms — such as Copilot, Gemini or ChatGPT — to fully integrate product discovery, task automation and payment within a single interface. 'With the introduction of Mastercard Agent Pay, we're effectively letting consumers and businesses close the loop,' she said. 'The user can receive recommendations, have tasks completed and make purchases — all in one place.' Use cases span routine buys like groceries or last-minute gifts to complex workflows like booking business travel, managing logistics or planning large events. In each scenario, the AI agent dynamically selects the optimal payment method while remaining within user-defined parameters. The near-simultaneous launches from Mastercard and Visa signal more than competitive posturing — they mark the early stages of a broader shift in the way commerce functions. As the payments industry continues to evolve from card-present to card-not-present to card-agent-present, the networks are positioning themselves not just as processors, but as critical infrastructure for the next wave of digital buying. 'These transactions were already happening, but invisible,' Haymond said. 'This is the latest way we have deployed AI tech across our business over several decades.' With AI agents becoming more capable and consumers increasingly open to machine-mediated transactions, Mastercard expects Agent Pay to move from early adopter novelty to mainstream norm. Partnerships with conversational AI platforms are already underway, and Haymond hinted at further integrations to be announced later this year. 'We expect that Mastercard Agent Pay will unlock an entirely new commerce reality,' she said. 'As AI technology continues to advance and consumers become more accustomed to AI-driven solutions, the demand for secure and personalized payments experiences will grow.'
