Visa moves into AI commerce alongside Google, aiming to maintain its dominance over the payments industry.
Visa has launched Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), a new standard developed with Cloudflare to help merchants identify and verify AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.
The protocol, announced on October 14, is designed to give sellers more confidence in agent-driven transactions, which have grown quickly alongside the rise of AI shopping tools.
According to Adobe data, AI-driven traffic to US retail websites has increased by more than 4,700% over the past year. However, Visa believes this surge in automated traffic has also brought new trust and security challenges for merchants.
TAP aims to solve these problems by allowing approved agents to securely pass key data to merchants during checkout. This includes proof of agent intent, whether the shopper has an existing relationship with the merchant, and relevant payment details.
Visa says it uses agent-specific cryptographic signatures and existing web standards to make these interactions more secure, while limiting the need for merchants to make major technical changes.
“We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers can trust AI agents as much as they trust their best customers and networks,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa.
“Our new agent protocol is focused on creating no-code functionality for merchants to securely identify agents with an intent to buy and provide a better payments and personalised experience for its known users.”
TAP is currently available through Visa’s developer centre and GitHub, and has already gained support from partners including Adyen, Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, Microsoft, Nuvei and Fiserv.
Complementing Google’s AP2
The launch comes just weeks after Google introduced its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which aims to standardise how AI agents initiate and complete payments across different platforms.
While AP2 focuses on the payment flow itself, Visa’s TAP looks more deeply at establishing who the agent is and whether it can be trusted before any payment happens.
In a release, Visa said it is working with industry partners to ensure TAP complements other protocols, including AP2 and Coinbase’s x402, and aligns with global standards bodies such as IETF, EMVCo and the OpenID Foundation.
Same players, new rails
The race to define protocols for agent-led commerce is being led by many of the same companies which have dominated payments for decades. Visa and Google are already positioning themselves at the centre of the AI payments stack, creating key layers of trust, identity and transaction flow.
This will be closely watched in regions like the UK and EU, where regulators have tried to reduce reliance on large US payment networks.
Visa and Mastercard’s dominance in card transactions has raised concerns in the past, prompting efforts to build alternatives such as the European Payments Initiative.
However, with agentic commerce still in its early days, the same companies appear to be the first in line to stake a claim in this new era of payments infrastructure.
