Thredd Joins Visa Agentic Ready Programme to Support AI Agent Payments

Thredd has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme to help European card issuers support transactions initiated by AI agents.

The issuer processing platform aims to provide the underlying infrastructure for agentic commerce, where AI agents assist consumers by carrying out authorised purchasing actions on their behalf.

Consumer payments platform Zilch will be among the first issuers to test the capability.

Using the Thredd platform, Zilch cardholders will be able to instruct an AI agent to find a product and, after confirmation, complete the purchase on their behalf.

When a user approves an AI agent’s recommendation, they authenticate the decision using a Visa Payment Passkey. The agent then initiates the transaction with the merchant using secure payment tokens.

To support this shift, the Thredd and Visa collaboration builds on existing infrastructure such as the Visa Token Service and device binding.

This ensures that an AI agent only handles a secure token rather than the underlying card details.

Thredd is also developing agent-specific tools for its clients. These include agent tokenisation, which scopes permissions specifically for machine-initiated transactions, and custom fraud monitoring.

The new fraud rules are designed to catch non-human anomalies, such as execution drift and abnormal transaction velocity.

“Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how payments will work, and getting the infrastructure right from the outset is critical,”

said Philip Belamant, CEO at Zilch.

Jim McCarthy, CEO of Thredd, noted that processors must adapt as AI agents enter the payments flow.

“As AI agents become a new participant in the payments journey, issuers need a way to embrace innovation without compromising security, customer control or speed to market,”

McCarthy said.

The capability will allow issuers across Europe to prepare for AI-driven payments using their existing Thredd platform integrations.

Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by Who is Danny via Magnific

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