The news: Visa debuted Intelligence Commerce Connect, which operates as a “network, protocol, and token vault-agnostic ‘on ramp’ to agentic commerce for agent builders, merchants, and enablers,” per a press release.

This program widens agents’ ability to pay for goods and services and helps merchants integrate agentic commerce into their storefronts through one hub.

How we got here: Visa has been steadily growing its agentic commerce integrations to compete for future AI shopping volume, which could equal up to one-quarter of all ecommerce spending in the next several years, per a September 2025 report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

• It launched Trusted Agent Protocol last October, a technical standard for AI agents to initiate, authenticate, and route payments between platforms and providers.
• It also introduced Visa Commercial Services (VCS) Hub, a platform for issuers and fintechs to deliver agentic solutions and other embedded financial services backed by AI.

Why this matters: As payments evolve, Visa has to develop new infrastructure to maintain its dominance and ward off competitors trying to steal market share. 

Mastercard announced Agent Suite earlier this year, a similar product to VCS Hub, and notched a partnership with Microsoft to have Agent Pay, its agentic protocol, back transactions made on Copilot’s chatbot. 

By making one hub that connects businesses to multiple agentic protocols and payment rails, Visa is making it simpler for merchants to pay extra for another value-added service geared towards agentic commerce. 

Implications for payment providers: While major agentic volume is years away, per our forecast, preparation to capture this new volume starts now. 

If Visa concentrates merchant-facing agentic infrastructure under one platform, it could capture AI-driven payment volume across other networks, weakening the incentive for merchants to build direct integrations with Mastercard, Stripe, or Google protocols. The competition shifts from which protocol wins to who controls the gateway routing them all. 

Mastercard and Stripe in particular have invested heavily in direct protocol relationships with AI platforms like ChatGPT; if merchants route through Visa's ICC instead, those direct partnerships lose some of their strategic value.