Fintech innovator Nuvei has officially announced a pioneering breakthrough in autonomous commerce by completing a live, first-party in-agent payment demonstration in collaboration with Visa. Alongside this operational milestone, the company unveiled its comprehensive merchant-led agentic payments strategy, signaling a paradigm shift in how artificial intelligence interacts with digital commerce.
The successful proof of concept was executed alongside Visa, IT systems integrator Arvato Systems, and contemporary fashion brand Kings and Priests. During the live transaction, a merchant’s AI agent autonomously initiated and completed a product purchase on behalf of a shopper. Crucially, the entire transaction occurred natively within the agentic environment without handing off to a separate external payment gateway. Supported by multiple European card issuers, the agentic payments were processed on live Visa rails, utilizing tokenized Visa credentials via Visa Intelligent Commerce. Consumer-defined guardrails, such as pre-approved categories and strict spending caps, governed the entire process to ensure security and compliance.
This technological milestone transitions agentic commerce from a conceptual discovery phase into a practical reality by unifying purchase discovery, authorization, and final settlement within a single first-party agent. Furthermore, it serves as an foundational proof point for “Nuvei Agentic” a protocol-agnostic execution layer designed to allow any artificial intelligence agent to initiate secure transactions.
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“Agentic commerce is the next evolution of digital commerce, with AI not just finding products but initiating purchases,” said Phil Fayer, Chair and CEO of Nuvei. “This proof of concept starts inside a merchant’s own experience and points to where payments are heading: a layer that lets any agent, on any protocol, make a payment.”
The strategic direction directly addresses real-world demand from enterprise merchants. During Nuvei’s Global Customer Advisory Board session, corporate partners identified the development of first-party agentic capabilities as an immediate business priority. Merchants also expressed a desire to scale these identical governance controls to public, third-party AI agents as the broader autonomous market matures.
Following the successful demonstration, Nuvei, Visa, and their participating issuing partners are actively collaborating to scale these capabilities toward full commercial production.
Assembling a Collaborative Agentic Payment Ecosystem
The successful execution of this proof of concept relied on a diverse network of technology, retail, and financial partners. Key contributors included Arvato Systems, Kings and Priests, and a consortium of prominent European issuing banks, including Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank, Bank Leumi, CAL, MAX, and the Bank of Cyprus.
“Through Visa Agentic Ready, we are extending existing capabilities including tokenization and network-level controls to enable agent-initiated payments in a trusted and consistent way,” commented Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product & Solutions, Visa Europe. “This proof of concept shows how those foundations can support new experiences today, with authentication continuing to evolve as the model scales.”
“This proof of concept shows how the payments ecosystem can enable AI-driven purchasing while preserving trust, control, and transparency,” said Carsten Bruning, Vice President Digital Commerce at Arvato Systems. “With Visa and Nuvei, we validated interoperability across the flow and proved that payment can complete inside the agent rather than on the merchant site.”
“For Kings and Priests, this was a firsthand look at how agentic commerce can open new channels for digital retail,” said Ralph Hürlemann, Founder of Kings and Priests. “An AI agent initiating a purchase on a consumer’s behalf can reshape how customers discover and buy online.”
Constructing the Execution Layer for the Future of Commerce
According to industry data from McKinsey, agentic commerce is projected to capture $1 trillion in global transaction volume by 2030, with projections climbing to between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2035. As the core transactional experience shifts directly into the AI agent, Nuvei’s latest milestone marks a critical initial step toward building out its Nuvei Agentic Payments framework, extending the company’s foundational “Every Payment, Everywhere” corporate strategy.
The architecture relies on two primary technical building blocks to create a unified interface:
- Protocol Compatibility Layer: This infrastructure allows merchants to integrate a single time and seamlessly accept payments across varying standards utilized by autonomous agents (including ACP, AP2, or MCP). These transactions are routed efficiently across global networks, with Nuvei intending to achieve certification against both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay.
- Know Your Agent (KYA): This framework introduces identity validation and governance to autonomous commerce. KYA registers and credentials AI agents, validates specific consumer mandates, evaluates agent reputation metrics, and maintains fully auditable transaction records.
Combined, these dual pillars provide merchants with a singular, streamlined interface accessible via Nuvei’s established platform and ISV integrations. This eliminates the need for businesses to re-engineer their core payment architecture to accommodate AI. Nuvei is targeting initial commercial availability for these capabilities encompassing protocol compatibility and agent identity frameworks in the second half of 2026.