Visa expands AI and Cybersecurity strategy in Europe

Visa has unveiled a new cybersecurity platform designed to help financial institutions identify threats before they develop into fraud, while simultaneously revealing a series of live agentic commerce transactions across Europe that demonstrate how artificial intelligence is beginning to participate directly in the payments ecosystem.

Visa expands AI and Cybersecurity strategy in Europe

Together, the announcements highlight Visa’s strategy of strengthening both the security and intelligence layers underpinning the next generation of digital commerce.

Bringing Enterprise-Grade Threat Intelligence to Banks

The newly launched Visa Threat Intelligence Platform (VTIP) makes the same cyber intelligence capabilities used to protect Visa’s global payments network available to banks and financial institutions.

The platform has been developed to help security, fraud and risk teams identify cyber threats earlier by combining traditional cybersecurity intelligence with payments-specific insights. Rather than relying on fragmented data sources, institutions can prioritise threats that have a direct connection to potential payment fraud.

Visa says the platform delivers malware indicators of compromise, vulnerability intelligence, brand impersonation monitoring, digital identity protection for employees and executives, and intelligence relating to compromised payment credentials circulating on the dark web.

The launch builds on Visa’s own operational experience. According to the company, it blocks approximately 90 million cyberattacks and 11 million phishing emails every month across more than 200 countries and territories, with VTIP having already been tested internally before being made available to clients.

Mandy Lamb, Head of Value-Added Services at Visa Europe, said the platform enables financial institutions to identify cyber risks before they translate into financial losses, helping reduce fraud while strengthening confidence in digital payments.

Agentic Commerce Moves Beyond Pilot Projects

Alongside the cybersecurity announcement, Visa revealed that it has successfully completed a series of live agentic commerce transactions with more than 30 European card issuers, including Barclays, BBVA, HSBC, Klarna and Revolut.

The transactions were completed using Visa Intelligent Commerce, allowing AI agents to browse merchant websites, select products and initiate purchases within spending limits and rules defined by consumers.

Unlike earlier demonstrations that focused primarily on proof-of-concept environments, these transactions were executed with participating merchants using Visa’s production infrastructure.

To support this new purchasing model, Visa has introduced its Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Directory, allowing merchants to verify authorised AI agents before processing transactions. Authentication is completed using Visa Payment Passkeys, enabling banks to maintain regulatory compliance while ensuring consumers retain control over payment authorisation.

The initiative represents another step in the industry’s transition towards AI-assisted purchasing, where software agents increasingly perform product discovery, comparison and transaction initiation on behalf of consumers.

Building Trust into the Future of Digital Payments

The twin announcements reflect Visa’s broader strategy of preparing payments infrastructure for an increasingly automated economy.

As cyber threats become more sophisticated and AI agents assume a larger role in commerce, payment providers must secure not only transactions themselves but also the digital identities, systems and autonomous applications that initiate them.

Visa says it has invested more than $13 billion in technology over the past five years to strengthen network security and combat fraud. The combination of advanced cyber intelligence and secure AI-enabled payment capabilities demonstrates how the company is seeking to position itself at the centre of both protecting and enabling the next generation of digital commerce.

Recent live agentic commerce initiatives across Europe suggest that AI-driven purchasing is rapidly moving beyond experimentation, with banks, merchants and payment networks now collaborating to build the trusted infrastructure required for commercial deployment at scale.