Key Takeaways
- Nuvei, together with Visa and Arvato Systems, completed a proof of concept for a first-party in-agent payment where an AI agent handles everything from purchase to payment, with multiple European banks authorizing transactions on live Visa rails
- The company unveiled a merchant-led strategy that starts with merchants' own agents, and plans to launch Nuvei Agentic, a payment layer supporting ACP, AP2, and MCP, in the second half of 2026
- Against the platform-led momentum in agentic commerce, a concrete option has emerged for merchants to keep control of customer relationships and payments. E-commerce businesses are entering the phase of designing sales through their own agents
Payment provider Nuvei announced on July 2, 2026 that it had completed an agentic commerce proof of concept (PoC) with Visa. The test succeeded in running an in-agent payment on the live Visa network, where an AI agent purchased a product on a shopper's behalf and completed the payment entirely inside the agent. Alongside the PoC, the company laid out its merchant-led agentic payments strategy and its vision for a new execution layer called Nuvei Agentic. This article walks through what was announced and what it means for e-commerce businesses.
What Nuvei and Visa Demonstrated with In-Agent Payment
Nuvei announced the completion of a first-party in-agent payment with Visa and unveiled its merchant-led agentic payments strategy.
www.prnewswire.comAccording to Nuvei's announcement, the proof of concept involved merchant technology provider Arvato Systems and fashion brand Kings and Priests alongside Visa. In the transaction, the merchant's AI agent initiated a product purchase on the shopper's behalf and completed the payment inside the agent, with no hand-off to a separate payment flow.
The payment was processed not in a test environment but on live Visa rails. Using a tokenized Visa credential within the Visa Intelligent Commerce framework, multiple European issuers including Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank, Bank Leumi, and Bank of Cyprus took part in authorization. Rather than a single-bank demo, the transaction succeeded as a live payment spanning multiple issuers, which is the technical milestone of this PoC.
Shopper-set guardrails were also built into the transaction. Consumers define spend caps and approved purchase categories in advance, and the agent can only execute payments within those limits. It is a design that answers concerns about delegating payments to AI with network-level controls.
Agentic commerce pilots to date have mostly covered product discovery or adding items to a cart. By keeping the purchase decision, authorization, and payment inside the agent, this initiative demonstrated an end-to-end flow from discovery to payment on a real card network.
Why Merchant-Led
What Nuvei emphasized in the announcement was less the success of the PoC itself than the direction of its strategy. The company puts first-party agents, meaning AI agents that merchants offer within their own shopping experiences, at the top of its priorities, and plans to extend support to external third-party agents as market demand develops.
This ordering reflects what its merchant customers are asking for. At Nuvei's Global Customer Advisory Board held the same week as the announcement, merchants identified first-party agentic capabilities as the immediate priority and endorsed a path where the same controls extend to public, third-party agents over time.
Behind this is wariness toward the platform-led momentum epitomized by ChatGPT's Instant Checkout. If AI platforms control everything from product discovery to payment, merchants risk losing control of customer data and the buying experience. Starting with agents that run inside their own sites and apps lets merchants move into agentic commerce without giving up customer relationships.
Agentic commerce is a platform problem, not a feature. Merchants need one place that connects them to every agent, protocol, and network while keeping them in control.
The Two Building Blocks of Nuvei Agentic
The PoC is positioned as the first proof point for Nuvei Agentic, the execution layer the company is building. The concept is a protocol-agnostic payment execution layer that any AI agent can call to pay.
The first component, the Protocol Compatibility Layer, lets merchants integrate once and support multiple agent standards. It absorbs ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) from the OpenAI ecosystem, Google-led AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), and MCP (Model Context Protocol), and on the network side Nuvei intends to certify against both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. However the protocol race plays out, the aim is to spare merchants from rebuilding their integrations.
The other component, Know Your Agent (KYA), manages agent identity and authority. It registers and credentials agents, validates that the consumer's mandate is genuine, scores agent reputation, and keeps every action auditable. It applies the logic of KYC in financial services to agents, and it is Nuvei's answer to the central question of agent payments: is this purchase truly backed by the consumer's intent?
Initial availability is targeted for the second half of 2026, with protocol compatibility, the KYA registry and agent risk scoring, network certifications, and a developer sandbox in the initial scope. Because it is built on Nuvei's existing Level 1 PCI-certified infrastructure, merchants do not need to re-engineer their payment stacks.
How the PoC Fits into Visa's Agent Payment Infrastructure
This PoC is not a one-off effort but an extension of groundwork Visa and Nuvei have been laying. Nuvei announced support for Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025 and has participated since the pilot stage in building the framework that helps merchants distinguish legitimate AI agents from malicious automation.
Visa, for its part, launched its Agentic Ready programme in Europe in March 2026. The programme gives issuers a structured pathway to test agent-initiated transactions in controlled production environments, and roughly 20 financial institutions including Barclays, HSBC UK, Revolut, and Santander signed on. The European issuers that joined this PoC sit within that same effort.
On market size, the announcement cites McKinsey projections. Agentic commerce transaction volume is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030 and $3-5 trillion by 2035, figures that underpin the urgency of payment companies' investments in this space.
What This Means for E-Commerce Businesses
For e-commerce businesses, the announcement is instructive on two fronts.
First, external AI platforms are not the only entry point into agentic commerce. A path that starts with a first-party agent embedded in a merchant's own site or app and completes payment there has now been shown to work on a real card network. Merchants can experiment with AI-driven selling in stages while keeping customer data in their own hands.
Second, the move to absorb protocol risk at the payment layer is gaining momentum. Businesses do not need to bet on whether ACP, AP2, or MCP will prevail; choosing a payment provider that supports them all is becoming the practical answer. Whether domestic payment providers in each market offer similar compatibility layers is a point to watch from the second half of 2026 onward.
Conclusion
The Nuvei and Visa proof of concept shows that AI agent purchasing has moved past the concept stage and now runs on real card networks. A merchant's agent initiates the purchase, multiple European banks authorize it, and payment completes with a tokenized credential, all within guardrails the consumer defined.
The merchant-led strategy and Nuvei Agentic, announced alongside the PoC, are the payment infrastructure side's counterproposal to the platform-led trajectory of agentic commerce. Ahead of the planned launch in the second half of 2026, the questions are how far the compatibility layer absorbing ACP, AP2, and MCP and the Know Your Agent framework will be implemented. As an initiative that could determine whether merchants enter the agent era with their customer relationships intact, it is worth following closely.
