Key Takeaways
- Visa NZ's David Peacock says ANZ NZ, ASB, BNZ, and Kiwibank are participating in Visa Agentic Ready and the issuer side is becoming ready
- The acceptance side, including merchants (cart, POS, CS) and regulators, lags significantly, widening the readiness gap
- E-commerce operators should check their payment partners' readiness and accelerate product data structuring and dispute workflow redesign
Visa NZ Frames the "Banks Ready, Merchants Lagging" Reality
Global payment firm Visa says big Kiwi banks are ready for the rollout of agentic commerce at scale, but that other stakeholders on the acceptance side of the transaction are lagging.
businessdesk.co.nzIn May 2026, New Zealand business outlet BusinessDesk NZ published comments from David Peacock, Visa's Country Manager for New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He noted that the four major banks, ANZ NZ, ASB Bank, Bank of New Zealand, and Kiwibank, are participating in the Visa Agentic Ready program and are positioned to support AI agent-led payments at scale.
The core message lies elsewhere, however. Peacock emphasized that while issuers are moving forward, acceptance-side stakeholders, including merchants and regulators, have not caught up. That gap, not the technology itself, is what now defines the rollout pace.
New Zealand continues to punch above its weight when it comes to innovation. Kicking off this program with local banks allows us to make sure agentic commerce is safe and secure for New Zealanders as more examples of agent-initiated payments become a reality.
Why New Zealand's Banks Can Claim "Ready"
Several structural tailwinds explain why NZ's major banks moved quickly on agentic readiness.
First, the open banking foundation is in place as a regulatory mandate. The NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) required ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac to provide open banking APIs from December 1, 2025, with Kiwibank required to deliver a payment initiation API by the end of May 2026 and an account information API by December. The plumbing AI agents need to safely invoke payments already exists on the bank side.
Second, on April 29, 2026, Visa announced the global expansion of its Agentic Ready program. The program partners with 85+ organizations across Asia Pacific and Latin America, while 20+ are already live across the UK and Europe. NZ's four banks are early partners simulating agent-initiated transactions in controlled environments using live cards and real merchants.
Third, competitive pressure has accelerated issuer readiness. In February 2026, Mastercard completed New Zealand's first authenticated agentic transaction with Westpac NZ at Event Cinemas. The Visa vs. Mastercard contest has effectively pulled bank readiness timelines forward.
The Structural Reasons Merchants and Regulators Lag
The acceptance-side picture is far less encouraging. A 2026 PYMNTS Intelligence survey of acquirers found that while roughly 80% claim readiness for agentic commerce, merchant-side capability is the real bottleneck.
What is happening on the merchant side. The remediation surface is wide: making product catalogs machine readable, building agent-facing cart and checkout APIs, redesigning fraud detection logic to handle AI-initiated transactions, and reworking customer support workflows. Integration costs grow significantly for operators on legacy e-commerce platforms, and the burden is heaviest for SMBs. Stripe estimates individual integrations with each AI agent can take up to six months, putting all but the largest merchants at risk of being excluded without shared infrastructure.
Regulators are equally behind. The NZ Commerce Commission has not issued specific guidance on AI agent payments, and consumer protection law does not anticipate AI agents independently initiating transactions. Liability allocation when "an AI agent bought something I did not approve" disputes arise, consent requirements, and disclosure obligations all remain legally ambiguous.
Contrasting Bank and Merchant Readiness
| Dimension | Bank (Issuer) Side | Merchant and Regulator Side |
|---|---|---|
| Key actors | ANZ NZ, ASB, BNZ, Kiwibank | E-commerce, retail, POS vendors, Commerce Commission |
| Technical foundation | Open Banking APIs (mandated December 2025) | Legacy e-commerce platforms, proprietary carts |
| Program participation | Visa Agentic Ready, Mastercard Agent Pay | Individual integrations take up to 6 months, no shared infrastructure |
| Primary challenges | Mostly resolved, now at simulation stage | Product data, fraud detection, CS workflow redesign |
| Regulatory readiness | Already embedded in financial regulation | No consumer protection rules for AI agent payments |
The contrast reveals a central truth: agentic commerce is no longer a technical problem on the bank side; it is an ecosystem alignment problem. Even if payment authorization runs flawlessly, consumers will not confidently delegate purchasing to AI agents while merchants cannot receive agent traffic or while liability remains unsettled.
What Global Comparisons Show
Visa's push extends well beyond NZ, with parallel rollouts across Singapore, Australia, the UK, and Saudi Arabia. Singapore has 13 bank and fintech partners; Europe has 20+ live. A common pattern emerges across markets: issuer onboarding moves relatively fast, while the broader merchant ecosystem takes far longer to catch up.
NZ has one advantage other markets lack. Its modest market size and concentration into roughly five major banks make it easier to coordinate the issuer side. The flip side is a long tail of smaller merchants where adoption cannot scale without shared infrastructure.
What E-commerce Operators Should Do Now
- Confirm whether your bank and PSP participate in Visa Agentic Ready, Mastercard Agent Pay, or similar agentic readiness programs
- Structure your product catalog as machine-readable data so AI agents can access prices, inventory, and attributes
- Add "agent transaction flag" handling to your payment gateway and fraud detection rules so agent-led transactions can be identified
- Build chargeback playbooks for "AI agent purchased on the customer's behalf" scenarios into your customer support workflow
- Update terms of service and consent flows with explicit clauses permitting or restricting agent-mediated purchases
The highest priority is making product data machine readable. In agentic commerce, if AI agents cannot mechanically retrieve accurate product information, your products will not even enter the consideration set. This overlaps with AEO (AI Engine Optimization), and operators that have not started yet face mounting mid- to long-term disadvantage.
Conclusion
The "banks ready, merchants and regulators lagging" dynamic Peacock described is a universal pattern visible across markets, not a New Zealand peculiarity. Payment infrastructure progresses under bank and network ownership, but real-world agentic commerce only works when the entire ecosystem, including product data, checkout experience, dispute handling, and regulatory guidance, comes into alignment.
While NZ's major banks lead through the December 2025 open banking mandate and 2026 Visa Agentic Ready participation, merchants face three pressing tasks: product data structuring, agent transaction handling, and dispute workflow redesign. Even with banks ready to run, agentic commerce cannot take hold without merchants ready to receive. The question for the coming months is how quickly merchants and regulators can match the issuer pace, an ecosystem-wide tempo problem more than any single technical hurdle.
