Visa and Revolut have completed a tightly controlled live test in France in which an artificial intelligence agent initiated a real purchase on a Revolut Visa card, authenticated through Visa Payment Passkeys rather than a one-time code, PIN or manual card entry. The trial, announced on 7 September 2026, took place inside Visa's Agentic Ready programme. Visa's test agent, My Agent, placed an order with merchant Cleverbridge using genuine card credentials, while tokenization replaced the primary account number so the agent never handled raw card data.
The experiment was intended to prove that agent-initiated payments can run on existing rails and still satisfy Europe's Strong Customer Authentication rules. Payment Passkeys are biometric credentials that bind a transaction to a verified cardholder and a prior instruction, allowing consumers to set spending limits and permitted categories in advance. Revolut described the test as an effort to understand how agentic payments could work in everyday commerce without weakening customer consent or issuer controls.
At the same time, Ant International, Visa and Mastercard said they will jointly develop common standards for identifying, verifying and monitoring AI agents involved in payments. The proposed Know Your Agent framework is designed so an agent that has established its identity with one participating payment provider would not need to repeat the process with another. Ant cited McKinsey projections that AI agents could handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.
Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer at Ant International, said safeguards will be needed as agents gain more authority over financial transactions because AI systems can produce incorrect information or take actions users did not intend. 'Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,' Yang told CNBC. Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, added that interoperability across Know Your Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale.
The companies have each been building separate infrastructure. Mastercard launched Agent Connect for product discovery, cart creation and customer-approved payments, alongside Agent Pay, which records customer authority through tokenized permissions. Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect in April, combining payment initiation, tokenization, authentication and spending controls for AI agents. Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines was unveiled in June with more than 30 payment, blockchain and technology companies, including Ripple, Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen and the Solana Foundation.
Visa has also been testing AI payments with blockchain-based settlement, and its stablecoin settlement activity reached a $7 billion annualized run rate. Ant International brings access to Alipay+, whose partner network includes more than 50 digital wallets. Alipay separately said users can now create recurring Starbucks orders and ride-hailing requests through AI tools, though payment approval remains with the customer. The latest initiatives remain mostly infrastructure tests, but they signal how card networks, wallets and blockchain-based rails are preparing for a future in which software agents shop and pay on behalf of people.
