Visa Wants to Be the Payment Rail for the Agentic Economy

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Visa is looking to position itself as the payments backbone for agentic commerce. On Wednesday, the global payments network debuted Intelligent Commerce Connect (ICC), a platform designed to help AI agents discover merchants and complete purchases on behalf of users. Notably, despite it coming from Visa, it works across any card network or credential infrastructure with no vendor lock-in.

With AI agent-driven sales forecasted to surpass $5 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey, ICC appears to be Visa’s move to expand its beachhead before that market matures. It’s akin to a payment gateway, providing developers and merchants with a simple toolkit to stand up their agentic commerce offering—Visa handles the payment complexity, leaving businesses to focus instead on delivering goods and services.

When an AI agent initiates a purchase, ICC identifies the card being used, replaces the real card number with a secure token, and routes the transaction to the appropriate payment network. Before passing the credentials to the merchant, it verifies that the agent is following the consumer’s instructions (e.g., whether it is within the spending limits). The payment is then processed on the relevant network, with ICC logging the transaction for transparency.

Agent builders will receive access to secure payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls, and authentication. And because ICC is powered by Visa’s Intelligent Commerce APIs and other card networks’ APIs, any major credit card can be used to pay.

Merchants can incorporate ICC into their apps to enable agents to make transactions. To maximize its effectiveness, the platform supports four significant, but competing, agentic protocols: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Stripe’s and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol, OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol. By supporting all four, Visa is positioning itself as the neutral payment layer underneath that competition, ensuring that no matter which protocol dominates, agentic transactions still flow through its network.

Moreover, ICC can help merchants ensure that their product catalogs are discoverable on AI platforms. This includes making item descriptions, prices, and other details more accessible, and optimizing the shopping experience so agents can make their purchase and checkout without leaving the platform.

Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect is currently in pilot, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Aldar, Firmly, and Nekuda among the first to test the service.

Featured Image: An AI-generated drawing representing shopping in the AI era. Credit: Adobe Firefly