INNOVATION Agentic Commerce: The expanded payments economy

Jack Forestell - Chief Product and Strategy Officer, 03/17/2026

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I’ve said this before: The agentic web is the biggest opportunity that I’ve seen in my 20-plus years in payment technology.

Last week at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum, I shared why the agentic web could be the most important shift in payment technology since the early days of digital commerce - and why Visa is built for this moment.

Agentic commerce will expand the payments landscape – here’s how:

• Agents remove friction from payments Digital transactions still have fall-off rates and declines. Agents can optimize these payments and increase success rates. When success rates rise, volumes rise — benefiting everyone from consumers and merchants to issuers and the broader ecosystem.

• Transaction density increases

  Over the past decade we have seen a continuous increase in transaction density (the number of transactions per dollar of purchase volume) across our network. Our transaction count has more than tripled in that timeframe as new use cases like subscriptions and streaming drive more frequent, lower‑ticket purchases. Agents will accelerate this trend — breaking purchases into smaller transactions and enabling consumption to be priced in hours, minutes, or even seconds rather than months or years.

• Payments digitize faster – especially in B2B

  Many payment flows remain manual and inefficient, and B2B is among the largest opportunities for modernization. Agents can remove friction across supplier onboarding, invoicing, reconciliation, and payment execution — accelerating digitization at scale.

• And finally, economic activity expands

  Every major wave of innovation in payments has driven growth. We believe agentic commerce will do the same. The efficiency gains from agentic systems have the potential to meaningfully expand global GDP — and when GDP grows, the payments ecosystem grows with it.

Agentic commerce, like eCommerce and mobile before it, is a generative growth opportunity — not a zero‑sum shift.

Visa is built for this moment

Agentic transactions introduce new complexity and new forms of risk as agents enter payment flows. Managing complex payments at global scale - securely and reliably - is exactly what Visa was built to do.

When you look at our history, we built foundational technologies across every phase of commerce when complexity and risk increased, and have continuously adapted our technology. We created new authorization methods in eCommerce and increased security with tokens in mobile commerce.

Now, we’re extending those capabilities to support agentic commerce. It’s why we developed Visa Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol – to provide a framework to build agentic experiences on top of our trusted infrastructure.

For example, if you’re building a commerce agent, you want your agent to act on behalf of your consumer, adapted to their preferences. You aren’t going with something experimental. You will look for payment methods that offer reach, security, and trust — Visa’s core strengths:

• Global reach and preference. Agents need payment methods that scale instantly. Visa connects more than 14,500 financial institutions and 175 million merchant locations worldwide. Consumers already prefer to transact with Visa because of security, trust, and rewards — and agents can follow those preferences to scale adoption.
• Security. We analyze hundreds of signals across roughly 300 billion transactions each year to assess risk, creating security that alternative payment methods simply can’t replicate. Solutions like tokenization allow us to bind credentials to specific agents — so payments can only be initiated by the right agent, for the right purpose, at the right moment.
• Trust. We’ve spent decades earning trust with consumers, merchants, and financial institutions. When we present the Visa brand as part of a payment transaction, all parties to the transaction have confidence and trust in the transaction. As autonomous software takes on greater responsibility in commerce, that trust becomes even more critical.
• A proven track record of scaling new payments solutions. For decades, we’ve built and scaled technologies to deliver safe, seamless payments experiences including new authentication methods, the development and extension of tokenization, and new commercial models that work for small and large ticket transactions. I am excited about the work our teams are pursuing to continue adapting and extending our technology and commercial reach to new use cases like agentic payments and machine to machine micro payments.

As agents are introduced to payment flows, one thing becomes clear: trust and security are the infrastructure that makes the entire system work. We’re moving with urgency and optimism to deliver the next era of commerce — powered by agents, built on Visa.