Visa takes agentic commerce live at independent European merchants with 30+ issuers, including Frasers and lastminute.com

At the Visa Payments Forum in Paris on 2 July 2026, Visa announced that AI agents have executed live purchases on behalf of cardholders at independent European merchant sites — lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot — with more than 30 European issuers including BBVA, ING, Barclays, NatWest and Revolut enabling the transactions. Merchant participation runs through Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Directory; issuer authentication runs through Visa Payment Passkeys, which Visa positions as SCA-compliant. Agents browsed, selected and initiated purchases within consumer-defined parameters.

This is the step from controlled demonstrations to agent transactions at merchants Visa does not control, which makes agent traffic an acceptance question rather than a lab question. Merchants now face a concrete decision about which agents to admit and on what terms, and acquirers face demand for agent-identification and consent-evidencing at the checkout.

It also sets a de facto authentication pattern — passkeys plus a scheme-run agent directory — ahead of any regulatory position on how SCA applies to agent-initiated payments.

• Whether Mastercard and the account-to-account schemes answer with a competing agent-identification framework
• Whether European regulators accept passkey-based agent authentication as SCA-compliant
• Whether large retailers admit or block agent traffic as it scales

• visa.co.uk