How does Visa use AI across its payment ecosystem?
Visa has used AI in payments since 1993, when it says it became the first network to deploy AI-based risk and fraud management, and it now does three things with it: it scores fraud on its own network, sells risk models to banks and merchants, and opens the network to AI agents. In 2023 Visa said it had several hundred AI models in production powering over 100 products and had spent more than $3 billion on AI and data infrastructure over 10 years. Its Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control unit blocked $40 billion in attempted fraud on the network in 2024. Visa Protect added AI scoring for card-not-present and account-to-account payments in 2024; Visa bought Featurespace for $946 million in December 2024 and agreed in August 2026 to buy BioCatch for $2.4 billion. For agents, Visa Intelligent Commerce launched on April 30, 2025 with Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung; an MCP server followed in September 2025 and the Trusted Agent Protocol, developed with Cloudflare, in October 2025. By December 2025 partners had completed hundreds of controlled agent-initiated transactions, and on June 10, 2026 Visa announced an OpenAI partnership, an Agentic Directory and a Large Transaction Model. Visa does not report revenue from AI products or agentic payment volumes.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
Data as of Oct 19, 2026 · Visa profile updated Oct 19, 2026 · 25 sources cited on this page · 52 fintechs profiled on this site · Markdown
Where in the payment flow does Visa use AI?
One row per layer, with Visa's product name and the latest dated figure Visa has published for it. Results are Visa's own measurements unless stated.
| Layer | Product | What the record shows | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authorization fraud scoring | Visa Advanced Authorization | Machine learning examines each transaction against more than 500 risk attributes in about one millisecond; Visa estimated it helped prevent $25 billion in annual fraud (2019) and $27 billion in 2022 | 2019–2023[1][2] |
| Card-not-present scoring | Visa Deep Authorization | A deep learning recurrent neural network model using petabytes of contextual data, announced for the first half of 2024 | March 27, 2024[4] |
| Card-testing (enumeration) attacks | Visa Account Attack Intelligence Score | Uses generative AI components, trained on more than 15 billion VisaNet transactions, and returns a risk score in 20 milliseconds | May 7, 2024[12] |
| Token provisioning | Visa Provisioning Intelligence | A machine-learning score from 1 to 99 for each token request; Visa put token provisioning fraud losses at an estimated $450 million in 2022 | December 13, 2023[13] |
| Account-to-account payments | Visa Protect for A2A, now A2A Protect | Found 54% of fraudulent transactions in a Pay.UK pilot (May 2024); a unified score built on Featurespace technology launched in September 2026 | 2024–2026[14][15] |
| Authorization routing | Visa Intelligent Authorisation | A machine-learning engine optimizes routing for acquirers; Visa cites a 96.3% average global approval rate; launched in Europe with Comercia Global Payments, Elavon, Fiserv, UNICRE and Worldline | March 19, 2026[16] |
| Outage resilience | Smarter Stand-In Processing | A real-time deep learning model that mirrors issuer approvals with up to 95% accuracy during outages | September 14, 2023[2] |
| Token trust signals | Token assurance signal and enriched token data | Evaluates a token across its lifecycle to give issuers a trust signal behind each transaction, including those initiated by AI agents | June 10, 2026[11] |
| Foundation model | Large Transaction Model | Trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection while increasing authorization performance and reducing false declines | June 10, 2026[11] |
How far has Visa taken AI agents into its network?
The profile covers the Intelligent Commerce launch and the Agentic Ready program; these rows add the developer, protocol and pilot record.
| Item | What happened | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Visa Intelligent Commerce | Opened Visa's network to developers building AI agents; Visa cited 4.8 billion credentials and over 150 million merchant locations the agents could use | April 30, 2025[7] |
| MCP Server and Acceptance Agent Toolkit | The MCP server connects AI agents to Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs; the toolkit, in pilot, runs invoicing and Pay by Link tasks from plain-language prompts | September 4, 2025[8] |
| Trusted Agent Protocol | An open framework, developed with Cloudflare, for agents to pass signed intent, consumer-recognition and payment data to merchants; feedback from Adyen, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Fiserv, Shopify, Stripe, Worldpay and others | October 14, 2025[9] |
| Live pilot | The FY2025 10-K says a 2025 pilot program processed live agentic token transactions in e-commerce and enterprise environments | November 6, 2025[5] |
| Hundreds of agent-initiated transactions | More than 100 partners, over 30 building in the sandbox and over 20 integrating directly; Skyfire, Nekuda, PayOS and Ramp in U.S. closed beta; Akamai supports Trusted Agent Protocol | December 18, 2025[10] |
| Intelligent Commerce Connect | One integration to accept agent payments across Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol, Agentic Commerce Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol, including non-Visa cards; pilots with Aldar, AWS, Diddo, Highnote, Mesh, Payabli and Sumvin | April 8, 2026[17] |
| Visa Payments Forum | Agent Score (built with New Generation), the Agentic Directory, the OpenAI partnership, and a command-line proof of concept for agents paying with tokenized credentials | June 10, 2026[11] |
| Know Your Agent framework | Visa, Mastercard and Ant International began work on a framework to identify and monitor AI agents across networks | September 17, 2026[18] |
Who does Visa work with on AI?
| Partner | What | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe, Samsung | Named collaborators at the Visa Intelligent Commerce launch | April 30, 2025[7] |
| OpenAI | Strategic collaboration: Visa supplies its network, credentialing and security infrastructure for agentic commerce across OpenAI | June 10, 2026[11][19] |
| Anthropic | Visa tested Claude Mythos on its own infrastructure under Project Glasswing and open-sourced the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness; tens of thousands of developers had downloaded it by August 2026 | 2026[20][21] |
| Cloudflare | Co-developed the Trusted Agent Protocol | October 14, 2025[9] |
| Featurespace | Acquired; its ARIC Risk Hub is sold as a Visa solution, and its technology went into Visa's first combined product, A2A Protect, in September 2026 | 2024–2026[22][23][15] |
| BioCatch | Agreement to acquire the behavioral-biometrics company for $2.4 billion in cash; closing expected by the end of Visa's fiscal Q2 2027 | August 3, 2026[6] |
| Pay.UK | A pilot on billions of historic UK retail bank transactions, covering more than 50% of annual UK account-to-account transactions | May 30, 2024[14] |
| OpenAI (internal use) | A secure GPT-4 instance deployed to employees, with a goal of 100% of employees working with generative AI by the end of 2023 | September 14, 2023[2] |
How does AI fit Visa's business, and what does it not disclose?
AI sits in Visa's value-added services. The FY2025 10-K describes Risk and Security Solutions "underpinned by real-time AI-driven scores", lists Visa Protect products such as Visa Advanced Authorization, Visa Deep Authorization and Visa Provisioning Intelligence, and places an MCP server in its access layer so AI systems can use Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs.[5]
Visa's investment figures are stated differently each time: more than $3 billion on AI and data infrastructure over 10 years (September 2023), $10 billion in technology and innovation over five years (March 2024) and more than $13 billion in technology and infrastructure over five years (August 2026).[2][4][6]
The 10-K's risk factors say there is no single global regulatory framework for AI, list risks from intellectual property, personal data, third parties, algorithm limits and training-data accuracy, and cite the EU AI Act's high-risk provisions taking effect in August 2026.[5]
What is not disclosed: revenue from AI products, agentic payment volumes, Large Transaction Model results in production (Visa's LTM paper presents a proof of concept as illustrative), and how many clients use A2A Protect.[5][11][24][15]
What does the Visa profile record on this topic?
The rows below are the entries of the Visa AI strategy profile that bear on this page, as of Oct 19, 2026; the profile holds the full record of 15 dated moves, 8 use cases and 22 sources.
| Use case | What the record shows | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa Intelligent Commerce | APIs, tokenized credentials and spend controls that let AI agents discover, initiate and complete purchases; hundreds of controlled real-world transactions and closed-beta pilots by December 2025, with Intelligent Commerce Connect in pilot from April 2026. | Pilot | [7][10][17] |
| Large Transaction Model | An AI model trained on billions of transactions, announced June 2026, intended to improve fraud detection while raising authorization performance and cutting false declines. | Announced | [11] |
| Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness | A governed multi-model pipeline that directs frontier models, including Anthropic's Claude Mythos, through threat modelling, verification, exploit-chain analysis and remediation of Visa's own code; open-sourced in June 2026 with human review of findings, and extended to remediation and validation in August 2026. | In production | [20][21] |
| Date | Move | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 27, 2026 | Vulnerability harness extended to remediation | Visa releases a new version of the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness that adds closed-loop remediation and validation and lets organizations deploy approved Anthropic and OpenAI models or other models by configuration; Visa says it has been downloaded by tens of thousands of developers since June 2026, and launches cybersecurity advisory services around it. | [21] |
| Jun 10, 2026 | Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness open-sourced | After testing Anthropic's Claude Mythos against its own infrastructure under Project Glasswing, Visa releases the harness that directs AI models through vulnerability discovery, verification and remediation, with human review at key points. | [20] |
| Jun 10, 2026 | OpenAI partnership, Agentic Directory and Large Transaction Model | At Visa Payments Forum Visa announces a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to enable Visa payments in agentic commerce, an Agentic Directory of verified agents and merchants, and a Large Transaction Model trained on billions of transactions. | [11][19] |
| Apr 29, 2026 | Agentic Ready programme expands globally | The programme for issuers to test agent-initiated payments with live cards and real merchants, already live with more than 20 partners in the UK and Europe, extends to 85+ partners in Asia Pacific and Latin America. | [25] |
| Apr 8, 2026 | Intelligent Commerce Connect unveiled | A single integration through the Visa Acceptance Platform that lets agent builders and merchants accept agent payments across Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol, Agentic Commerce Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol, including non-Visa cards; in pilot with partners including AWS and Highnote. | [17] |
| Oct 14, 2025 | Trusted Agent Protocol introduced | Visa unveils an open framework for agents to pass cryptographically signed intent, consumer-recognition and payment data to merchants, so merchants can tell trusted shopping agents from malicious bots; early partners include Adyen, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Fiserv, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and Worldpay. | [9] |
| Apr 30, 2025 | Visa Intelligent Commerce launches | At the Visa Global Product Drop, Visa opens its network to developers building AI agents that browse, select and buy for consumers, naming Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung as collaborators. | [7] |
When did Visa start using AI?
Visa says it became the first payment network to deploy AI-based technology for risk and fraud management in 1993, using neural networks. By 2019 Visa Advanced Authorization analysed every transaction in about a millisecond, and in 2023 Visa said it had several hundred AI models in production powering over 100 products.
What is Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol?
An open framework Visa introduced on October 14, 2025, developed with Cloudflare, that lets approved AI agents send cryptographically signed data to merchants: their intent to buy, whether the consumer is known to the merchant, and optional payment information. It helps merchants tell trusted shopping agents from malicious bots.
Does Visa have an MCP server for AI agents?
Yes. On September 4, 2025 Visa introduced a Model Context Protocol server that connects AI agents to Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs, and piloted the Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit, which lets developers and business users run invoicing and payment-link tasks with plain-language prompts.
Which AI companies does Visa partner with?
Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung were named at the Visa Intelligent Commerce launch in April 2025. Visa added a strategic collaboration with OpenAI in June 2026, tested Anthropic's Claude Mythos for vulnerability hunting, and built the Trusted Agent Protocol with Cloudflare.
What is Visa's Large Transaction Model?
An AI model Visa announced on June 10, 2026, trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection while raising authorization performance and cutting false declines. Visa's paper on the approach says a proof of concept caught more than five times the fraud value of a production gradient-boosted model, a result Visa calls illustrative.
- Visa Prevents Approximately $25 Billion in Fraud Using Artificial Intelligence
- 30 years of AI and counting (Rajat Taneja, President of Technology)
- Visa Unveils its Scam Disruption Practice, Helping Protect Consumers and the Financial Ecosystem Globally
- Visa's Growing Services Business Infused with New AI-Powered Products
- Visa Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025
- Visa to Acquire BioCatch
- The Future is Here: Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI
- Visa advances agentic commerce with MCP Server, Acceptance Agent Toolkit
- Visa Introduces Trusted Agent Protocol: An Ecosystem-Led Framework for AI Commerce
- Visa and Partners Complete Secure AI Transactions, Setting the Stage for Mainstream Adoption in 2026
- Visa Announces New AI, Stablecoin and Token Innovations to Power Intelligent, Programmable Commerce at Visa Payments Forum
- Visa Announces Generative AI-Powered Fraud Solution to Combat Account Attacks
- Visa Provisioning Intelligence Launches to Combat Token Fraud
- Visa's new AI tool for Faster Payments could help save UK over £330m a year on fraud and APP scams
- Visa Launches Enhanced A2A Protect Innovations to Help Financial Institutions Stop Fraud Before Money Leaves Accounts
- Visa launches Visa Intelligent Authorisation to modernise payment processing in Europe
- Visa Opens the Door to AI-Driven Shopping for Businesses Worldwide
- Payment giants battle the fear factor in agentic commerce
- Visa Partners with OpenAI to Power the Next Generation of AI Commerce
- Visa Releases Its AI-Powered Cyber Defense System to Open Source
- Visa Expands Support for its Clients and the Industry as Organizations Navigate New AI Era of Cybersecurity
- Visa Completes Acquisition of Featurespace
- Visa Boosts AI Capabilities to Further Reduce Fraud
- Large transaction models (LTMs): The AI breakthrough transforming fraud prevention (undated page, retrieved 2026-10-19)
- Visa Announces Global Expansion of Agentic Ready Program
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