Agentic Commerce Breakthrough
Nuvei, Visa Advance Agentic Commerce with First-Party In-Agent Payment Success
Nuvei has completed a live proof of concept with Visa, Arvato Systems, and fashion brand Kings and Priests that lets a merchant's AI agent buy a product on a shopper's behalf — and pay for it — without ever leaving the agent interface. Montreal Gazette reported the milestone marks the first time a purchase, authorization, and payment have all happened inside a first-party agent, with no separate checkout page required.
The companies are now working to scale the technology toward full production. Agentic commerce — where AI agents shop and pay autonomously — is projected to drive $1 trillion in global transaction volume by 2030 and as much as $5 trillion by 2035, according to Street Insider.
How the In-Agent Payment Actually Worked
Traditional AI shopping tools hit a wall at checkout. They could find a product, but the shopper still had to click "Buy Now" on an external page. Nuvei's proof of concept eliminates that step entirely. A merchant-owned AI agent identifies what a customer needs, secures authorization, and executes payment — all inside the same interface.
The key innovation is what Nuvei calls a "protocol-agnostic execution layer." In plain terms, it is a universal translator. Any AI agent can call it to process a payment, regardless of which system built the agent. Nuvei's infrastructure already supports over 600 payment methods globally, so the layer can plug into a wide range of commerce environments.
Nuvei and Visa Frame This as Commerce's Next Decade
Nuvei Chair and CEO Philip Fayer said the goal goes beyond a single feature. "We aren't just building a feature; we are building the infrastructure for the next decade of commerce," Fayer said. "By allowing the payment to live inside the agent, we remove the final friction point in the customer journey."
Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell backed the vision. "Agentic commerce represents the next frontier of the digital economy," he said. Visa provides the security, credentialing, and settlement infrastructure that makes agent-initiated payments recognized as valid. Without Visa's rails, the agent's "buy" command would have nowhere to go.
Merchant-Led Design Cuts Fraud Risk but Raises Consumer Questions
Earlier AI shopping tools were "consumer-led" — a shopper's bot would scour the web for deals. Nuvei's approach flips that model. Here, the merchant owns the agent. Kings and Priests, the luxury fashion brand used in the test, controlled the agent that made the purchase. This keeps the brand in charge and reduces fraud risk, since the agent operates within a known, trusted merchant environment.
But consumer advocates are raising questions. If the agent belongs to the merchant and not the shopper, will it find the best price — or just close the most profitable deal for its owner? Privacy groups also warn that removing the checkout page means shoppers may lose track of what their agents spend. EU regulators are said to be weighing a new "delegated authority" framework to keep humans as the final authorized signatory on any agent-initiated transaction.
$5 Trillion Market Drives the Race to Scale
The financial stakes are enormous. Agentic commerce is expected to hit $1 trillion in transaction volume by 2030. By 2035, that figure could reach $3 to $5 trillion, according to PR Record Gazette. Those numbers explain why Nuvei, Visa, and their issuing bank partners are moving quickly from proof of concept toward production-ready systems.
Competitors in decentralized finance argue that a Visa-Nuvei partnership creates a new fee layer on AI transactions and that blockchain-based smart contracts would be a cheaper alternative. For now, however, the Nuvei-Visa model has the advantage of working inside existing global banking rails — the same infrastructure that already handles trillions of dollars in annual payments.
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