en.Wedoany.com Reported - Visa is expanding its partnership with OpenAI to directly integrate its payment network into AI agent applications, enabling agent-driven autonomous transactions.
Visa is preparing the infrastructure for AI agent-assisted payments and deepening its global partnership with OpenAI to advance this effort. Visa has enrolled local banks in its Agentic Ready programme, which aims to help financial institutions handle fully autonomous AI-driven transactions, though no South African banks have yet joined. Lineshree Moodley, Visa's Country Manager for South Africa, discussed the local rollout during a media roundtable in Sandton. OpenAI, already a founding partner of Visa's Intelligent Commerce initiative launched in April 2025, has further advanced this integration under the new agreement.
Under the agreement, Visa will provide its global network, tokenization infrastructure, and fraud monitoring to support autonomous transactions initiated by AI agents within the OpenAI platform. The two companies will also explore enterprise applications, including developer workflows powered by OpenAI's coding agent, Codex. Transactions operate within user-defined boundaries, covering spending limits, approved merchant categories, and necessary authorizations, using tokenized Visa credentials with real-time fraud detection.
"AI's transformation of commerce will be more profound than the internet or mobile technology," said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, in a statement. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is on ensuring transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless."
Marco Mahrus, Head of Commerce Partnerships at OpenAI, stated that the move aims to build infrastructure for "secure, transparent, and user-controlled agent transactions." Visa's Stay Secure 2026 study, conducted by Wakefield Research across 17 markets, shows that only 23% of South African consumers trust AI agents to make purchases on their behalf. While OpenAI's transactions may accelerate technology deployment, they cannot bridge the trust gap.
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