Visa Intelligent Commerce

The published description of the credential is a new pass-through payment token, specific to agents, intended for use at Visa-accepting merchant locations. Pass-through is the load-bearing part: what the agent carries stands in for a card at a merchant that already takes cards, rather than being a new way for two parties to settle.

Consent is captured on a person rather than assumed from the agent. In the documented flow the agent asks the user to authenticate the payment instruction with their passkey, and then provides that instruction onward to the platform. The approval is an event that happens somewhere the agent is not, which is the same separation AP2 draws with a role of its own.

Placing it against the HTTP payment rails is a question of which category it is in. This belongs to agentic commerce — an agent buying through a merchant's checkout — rather than to machine payments, where software pays for a resource it is using and no checkout exists. A purchase completed on a merchant's stack leaves its record with that merchant and its processor, so there is nothing for a third party to read from outside.