Sunday, May 3, 2026

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The Agentic Commerce Report

Issue 17 Week of March 16–22, 2026

Visa Launches Agent-Commerce Certification Programme for European Merchants and Issuers

Issue 17March 16–22, 2026Synthesised from 4 sources

Visa announced a merchant and issuer certification programme for agent-initiated payments in Europe this week 1, providing a qualification pathway for participants seeking to accept and process agent transactions within the Visa network. The programme defines technical and compliance requirements for Trusted Agent Protocol integration at the European regulatory and network level.

Merchants who complete the certification gain eligibility to accept agent payments without additional per-transaction liability review. Issuers completing the programme can offer TAP-enabled agent payment flows to their cardholders. Visa stated the programme addresses the European regulatory context, including PSD2 strong-customer-authentication requirements in agent delegation scenarios.

Visa’s European certification programme follows the Santander-Mastercard European first payment one week prior 2 and Visa’s own TAP publication from October 2025 3. The European programme parallels Mastercard’s international Agent Pay rollout, which reached Australia in January 2026 4. Both major card networks published European infrastructure within a two-week window.

Two European agentic commerce events in consecutive weeks mark the first concentrated regional activity in the tracking period. Both Payments-lane participants with published network protocols — Mastercard and Visa — have now released European-specific deployment pathways.

Events this issue

1 event