Nuvei and Visa Test AI-Driven Payments for Merchant Agents

The proof of concept utilized tokenized Visa credentials to settle payments across multiple European issuers, including Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank, and Bank Leumi. By keeping the purchase, authorization, and payment inside a first-party agent, the collaboration avoids the need for a secondary hand-off to a merchant’s external website. This architecture relies on shopper-defined guardrails, such as spending limits and approved product categories, to maintain security during autonomous transactions.

Nuvei aims to scale this system through its new execution layer, designed to be protocol-agnostic. The company plans to support standards like ACP and MCP, with full production availability targeted for the second half of 2026. This infrastructure integrates a 'Know Your Agent' registry to handle identity verification and risk scoring, effectively treating agentic commerce as a platform-wide necessity rather than a standalone feature. With McKinsey projecting agent-driven transaction volumes to reach trillions by 2035, the industry is moving to formalize how these agents interact with existing payment rails.