It’s the Age of Agentic with Visa

When you reach the top, how do you measure the next peak to climb? A 2026 World Cup Sponsor, the first global partner for both Red Bull Racing Teams in Formula 1, an Official Payment Technology Partner of the Olympic Games and the name carried with us on at least one card in our wallets - Visa is arguably one of the most recognised players in the game.

Any game. 

The payments giant takes bold strokes to make sure it stays at the top. Acting as a frontline leader for innovations in agentic commerce, Visa recently announced new innovations at its Payments Forum (VPF) in Paris earlier this year. 

Among announcements about Visa Infinite and its Threat Intelligence platform, it also proclaimed the next milestone in its global Agentic Ready programme, originally launched only in March of this year, which aims to advance agentic commerce through the collaboration of infrastructure partners, standards and global merchants.

Speaking to Finance Chief exclusively, Mathieu Altwegg, SVP, Head of Product and Solutions for Visa Europe, explains: “Agent-to-agent communication and protocol is also something big that's shaping up and will come, I think, relatively shortly on the horizon.”

The surge in artificial agents is not something localised to consumers for their payments,it’s something that business, and even boardrooms, can make use of. 

“A small business could use a master agent, as a way to describe it, to actually orchestrate multiple agents, each of them specialised in a specific aspect of their business.” Mathieu says.

“That's also true for the CFO of a bigger company, where they'll be deploying different types of tools. So we're not in the business of creating these master agents, but we're making sure that the different capabilities we offer as a service are actually agentic-ready.”

The event also demonstrated an example of an AI agent booking a holiday, via Visa’s MyAgent.

After being given a simple prompt, the agent searched for an appropriate holiday destination using information from participating merchant lastminute.com; after being given narrower parameters (date, price), the holiday was booked.

This happened within minutes, and after user approval, the demonstration listed a frictionless checkout experience using pre-saved card details. 

This level of agentic planning inspires a wider question: will agents be used for personalised financial assistance? As companies see a wider integration of conversational chat bots with consumers, it’s a hard question to ignore. 

Mathieu explains: “It's going to be a very exciting space for personal finance management, especially if you can then connect that to Visa's capabilities and some of the Visa insights that our consumers and our clients already have access to.”

“We all have different levels of financial literacy. Gen AI technologies are the most incredible technology we've ever built, but wrapped into the simplest interface we all control, which is human language.”

Visa tapped into this with the launch of its AI Financial Assistant in July, 2026. The assistant is aimed at helping banks and financial institutions “evolve their apps for an AI‑driven era”, according to the company.

Visa, an organisation that understands deeply just how important Brand is (as it was named a key priority by Oliver Jenkyn in an introductory talk at the VPF) is ensuring that this understanding is bridged with the developments of an agentic world.

Banks can use the feature to deliver personalised financial insights to cardholders in a conversational manner, without custom development to fit under the brand. 

It’s a brave, agentic world: and Visa is leading the charge.